MCGY1031: Musical Worlds of Today

Tutorial participation (20%), critical response (20%), essay (40%), final examination (20%).

None

This subject is a compulsory history unit for education students and is taken by pretty much everyone at some point in their degree at the Con. Having previously seen above how greatly I felt about MCGY2613, I felt like this subject didn't really get a fair shot from me because in my eyes, it never lived up to how fantastic the history I did in Semester 1 was. Coming into it, I was already quite apprehensive but over time, I came to really not enjoy it.

The assessments were really poorly coordinated and communicated with us. I know the unit of study outline exists and yes, I did read it, but there was almost no mentioning of our critical response until the tutorial the week before it was due (meanwhile, Phillip reminded us literally a month in advance for our MCGY2613 assessments to get them done). On top of that, I really did not enjoy doing the essay, largely because I was comparing it to how much more originality and creativity I could offer in my MCGY2613 one but also to an extent because (and this is going to sound super horrible but I would like to be honest) I felt like even I could write a better question. The guidelines for that essay were also vague and although I did well, I was still confused about it after getting my marks back. As for the exam, I'd have to say it was the most chilled I have ever been for one. It didn't require much studying if you had revised during the semester but I still had to conduct extra research to build my notes because we hardly covered anything about the set works in the actual tutorials.

I do have to say most of my negative feelings stem from the inconvenience this unit had for me in the semester; both my lecture and tutorial followed 9am 2 hour seminars so the unit wasn't in an ideal place to be appreciated by me from the get go. If I'll give the subject one point of praise, it'd be the lecturers they chose for the individual topics. Since the topics were so diverse, I was really glad they chose to bring in experts in those fields to speak about them. I particularly enjoyed Clint's lectures and felt like I learnt valuable lessons in them. While I didn't come out of this subject saying "I would love to do it again" (in fact, it's probably the subject I'm feeling the least inclined towards), I can recognise that it taught me to contextualise music more and to consider the cultural discussions that emerge from contemporary music-making practices. I have submitted most of these thoughts in my survey so I hope they review the subject carefully and improve it because it has potential to be a formidable history subject at the Con with better organisation and direction.

1x 2 hour lecture, 1x 1 hour tutorial

3/5

Yes

Rachel Campbell and other guest lecturers

None

2.5/5

None; you are provided with weekly readings to do online. I, however, would highly recommend the book Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity (Catriona Elder) which I found a great supplementary text to read and use for the essay assessment.

2019 Semester 2

90 HD