Terms, Titles, and Texts
The 116 Community Colleges in California (CCC) serve 2 million students, offering high-quality education in a variety of modalities. I have been teaching music in the CCC system for over twenty years, and in that time, I’ve seen many changes. One recent and significant change across the board has been the transition to the use of free and low-cost textbooks. Removing or greatly reducing the cost of textbooks for students removes barriers to equity and allows students to choose their classes without added financial stress.
At Los Angeles City College (LACC), where I have taught in the music department for twenty years, many departments have been embracing the use of OER/ZTC (Open Educational Resources and Zero Textbook Cost) for quite some time. My department has been using OER/ZTC in all our classes for five years. Yet our music appreciation classes and music history sequence posed some interesting challenges and needed some fresh ideas after decades of using textbooks that cost anywhere from $50 to $150. In this article, I will elaborate on the method I’ve used for our music history sequence: remixing openly available texts.
Here’s a quick rundown of the terms used in the OER/ZTC world. One may adopt an OER/ZTC text, which means that you switch to using that text without making changes to it. The text may be electronically housed in LibreTexts or OpenStax or any other repository that is freely available. One can adapt a text, which is to make small changes without changing the overall structure. In that same category, we can include “update,” which means editing for currency or relevance, again, without altering the structure. The final category includes revising and remixing. Revising includes making major changes to existing OER/ZTC materials, while remixing allows one to develop course content from multiple open educational resources and may even include original course content provided by the instructor. For all these methods, the user must have an awareness of the Creative Commons (CC) licenses held by the authors of the OER materials. Some licenses allow their work to be remixed, while some do not.
I first began using Resonances: Engaging Music in Its Cultural Context (University of North Georgia Press, 2020 Esther M. Morgan-Ellis, author and editor) for my Music Appreciation class. It is topic-based, dividing chapters into categories like “Music for Storytelling” and “Music for Political Expression.” It draws upon many musical traditions from around the world, including western Classical music, and supports all examples with historical and cultural context. In other chronologically organized texts based in the western Classical tradition that I used in the past, some non-western, non-art music traditions were discussed, but these sections were often set apart at the ends of chapters, “othered” and tokenized by trivialization. Resonances didn’t feel like that to me. It felt more like the western art music examples were part of a larger context: another type of music—not better—just one of many unique and interesting products of human culture. I began to wonder if it was possible to apply a similar approach to the Music History sequence.
In the Community College milieu, choosing a different approach or textbook is not just a matter of academic freedom. We often find ourselves at the mercy of state-mandated course descriptions, which might feel quite narrow. The descriptions for Music History I and Music History II, for example, explicitly refer to Western European music and mention no other musical traditions. And since these courses are “transferrable” into four-year music programs at University of California and Cal State schools, it’s important that any changes not wander too far afield from the descriptions.
Furthermore, the two classes of the Music History sequence are technically part of “Area 3: Arts and Humanities” in the transfer curriculum; they are categorized as general education courses. As such, it is impossible to require students to follow along with written scores. Certainly, many music majors take the sequence by the time they transfer, but we have many students in these classes who enjoy music only as listeners. How then, could we make this highly specialized class more accessible and useful to a broader audience while still giving music majors the tools they need to succeed in four-year programs? And could Open Educational Resources support these courses?
I decided to use three OER texts for the music history sequence, excerpting the sections that I felt were most relevant for the curriculum. In the parlance of OER/ZTC, I “remixed” these three texts to create a new “text” for Music History I and for Music History II. To give the classes a basic chronological structure, I use Understanding Music: Past and Present (UMPP) by N. Alan Clark, Thomas Heflin, Jeffrey Kluball, and Elizabeth Kramer (University of North Georgia Press). UMPP has a CC BY-SA 4.0 license, enabling “reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator.” I also use Resonances, to enhance the study of certain topics, like sung drama, music for protest, and music for spiritual expression. This text also has a CC-SA 4.0 license that allows remixing. Furthermore, Danielle Fosler-Lusser’s Music on the Move (University of Michigan Press), which was published through the TOME program (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) provides excellent opportunities for students to consider in-depth analyses of musical migration, colonialism, the mediation of technology, and politics. These readings are especially useful for further discussion and for prompting possible research topics, especially for the semester-long, scaffolded project that students propose, design, complete, and self-assess. Music on the Move is an open access resource under a CC BY-NC license, which allows remixing for noncommercial purposes only and attribution must be given to the creator. There are also some—in my opinion—essential topics missing from all of these sources, and I have authored those sections myself.
Case Study: Music History I
I’d like to share how the general overview of the first six weeks of my Music History I class has changed over time. I took over teaching this course in the 2010s using the Grout/Palisca/Burkholder A History of Western Music, and the list of topics I covered in the first six weeks of the class appears on the left side of Table 1. Now I draw from three OER texts to create a curriculum that addresses the musical traditions of Western Europe while placing them in a wider global context. These changes are shown on the right side of the table.
| Week | Previous Version | Current Version |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Music in Antiquity/Early Christian Church | Brief history of musicology; discussion of various methodologies; investigation of music in its cultural context (self-authored) |
| 2 | Roman Liturgy and Chant | Elements of music and music terminology (chapter 2 in Resonances) |
| 3 | Song and Dance Music to 1300 | Music for Spiritual Expression (chapter 11 in Resonances; may include Music on the Move, chapter 3) |
| 4 | The Rise of Polyphony | Music of the Middle Ages in Europe (chapter 2 in Understanding Music Past and Present) |
| 5 | Music and the Renaissance | Music of the Renaissance (chapter 3 in Understanding Music Past and Present) |
| 6 | England and Burgundy | Sung and Danced Drama (chapter 4 in Resonances and chapter 1 in Music on the Move) |
I begin my class not by jumping into the music of Ancient Greece, where many texts begin, but by delving into the discipline of musicology itself. In this self-authored section, I provide a brief history of the discipline, define some of the relevant terms, and problematize the course description as it is provided. Here I propose studying the material of the course within a global perspective, investigating music as a cultural phenomenon affected by issues of race, class, colonization, oppression, politics, and capitalism.
The material for the second week is drawn from Chapter 2 in Resonances, which describes the elements of music. I added this to make sure that all the non-music majors in the class can understand and use the terminology. In week 3, we read Chapter 11 in Resonances: “Music for Spiritual Expression.” This chapter begins by covering Christian chant, specifically the work of Hildegard of Bingen. The subsequent section discusses the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, using the music of Palestrina as a model. A discussion of J.S. Bach’s contribution to Lutheran church music follows (we will encounter Bach again in a later module). The chapter continues with the development of the familiar hymn “Amazing Grace” including three more modern interpretations of it—including a live performance by Aretha Franklin. This is a great place to discuss performance practice, especially within our historical study of the music in the time period covered by this class.
Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. While this musical example does not fit into our Antiquity to 1750 description, I leave it here to allow space for spiritual expression that doesn’t fit neatly into an established church tradition. Another option would be to replace this section with a section from Chapter 3 of Music on the Move, “The African Diaspora in the United States,” which discusses the assimilation and influence of the Spiritual in African American churches after 1700.
In the fourth week of class, Chapter 2 of Understanding Music Past and Present covers Music of the Middle Ages in Europe. It provides some historical grounding of musical and non-musical events in Europe and shows images of relevant artworks, architecture, and other cultural artifacts. It provides a deeper dive into the time period introduced with Hildegard’s music in the previous week. Furthermore, it lays out the development of polyphony, focusing on the work at Notre Dame, and explores secular music of the time as well. The chapter ends with a love song in a fixed form by Guillaume de Machaut. Week 5 continues with the next Chapter in UMPP, which covers “Music of the Renaissance.”
Week 6 focuses on “Sung and Danced Drama” as covered by Resonances. Here again, we have a couple of musical examples that do not fit into the time period, but I think the benefit of showing musical works with similar aims in the context of different cultures and times can be very thought-provoking for students. In this case, the chapter begins with two sung dramas: the musical Hamilton and Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Within the coursework, students may be asked to compare and contrast the story-telling in these two works in a discussion, or they may be asked to reflect on which style feels more effective at conveying narrative or expressing emotion. For danced drama, the chapter offers an excerpt of The Love Dance of Klana Sewandana, from Java. Because the culture of Indonesia was heavily influenced by colonialism, an assignment for this week asks students to read and reflect on a section of Chapter 1, “Colonialism in Indonesia,” from Music on the Move.
The remaining nine weeks of the class continue in this fashion, with chapters, or sections of chapters, from the three texts laid out in a way that preserves the general shape of the traditional chronological course, with interesting and provocative digressions both within and outside of the Antiquity to 1750 “time bubble.”
I know that my Music History sequence looks very different from the ones I participated in as a student and TA. It also looks very different from the version I began teaching at LACC years ago. But it’s a very different world. The core values of the class—research methods, critical thinking, the evolution of music and musicking over time, music within social, cultural, and political contexts—are all still there. Most of the Western Music History “stuff” is still there as well, but now it’s part of a larger picture. My hope in spending time and effort to create a sequence that integrates musical traditions from around the world is that this larger picture honors and celebrates all kinds of human music-making without judgment or limitation.
The Nuts and Bolts of Remixing
Once we make the decision to “remix” multiple sources into one cohesive text for a class, the challenge becomes how to present the material in a way that is easy for students to access. While we can send them out to multiple sources to read selected chapters, we want their experience to be as seamless as possible. Bringing all the material to one centralized location—and even embedding this information directly into our learning management systems—sets our students up for success. There are different ways to do this and tools to assist, and I’ll introduce a couple of them to you here.
If you’re using an “Open Author” resource in OER Commons, you can remix texts using their Open Author Tool. You begin by making a copy of the resource you want to remix. Fortunately, the “make a copy” feature will only be available on resources that allow remixing. Once you’ve made your copy, you can edit it to add new material, cut what’s not needed, or blend multiple Open Author resources. OER Commons provides the needed attributions to the original author, and the new remix automatically provides a link back to the source. In this case, you are essentially creating an entirely new resource which other people on OER Commons can also use—and even further remix.
LibreTexts, where many OER texts are housed, provides a couple of different ways to use their texts in Canvas. One can integrate a single text directly into Canvas using a download into an .imscc file from the homepage of the text on the LibreTexts site. On the menu, choosing “Download LMS file,” allows the text to be imported into a Canvas shell. If you want to use only selected chapters—or chapters from multiple LibreTexts resources—you can choose to upload single chapters into the course shell. Each chosen chapter will appear as a module with separate pages for each chapter subsection. You can remove subsections if you want, or rename the pages in Canvas, although the LibreText page will appear with its original subsection title once the student clicks on the page to read it.
For an even more bespoke version, one can use the OER Remixer tool, which empowers an instructor to quickly assemble a customized remix from sources existing within the LibreText library. This allows the remixed version to be easily shared with the community. To use this tool, you must create an account and fill out a short form to be verified as an Instructor in LibreTexts. The LibreText site provides numerous instructional videos and guides on to help you through the process including How to Make a LibreText Remix and Building a Remixing Map.
It has been an ongoing, years-long process to remix these texts for the Music History sequence at LACC. For those who want to embark on this process, but are short on time, I recommend starting with a single module/unit, or even with a single assignment. Positive results and useful feedback from students—through periodic anonymous surveys throughout the semester—can drive the direction of your work. You can continue replacing or updating individual units/modules whenever you have the time to devote to them, and eventually, over the course of perhaps multiple semesters, you will have a remixed text that serves the needs of your students and your class. Currently, I am choosing to embed sources directly into Canvas without publishing my own remix. The main reason for this is that I am continually making changes, incorporating feedback from students, and considering new ways to present the material. The integration tools make it easy to change my mind, add more, delete an unnecessary section, or reorder what’s there. If I hit upon a version of this material that I’m fully satisfied with, I know that sharing it will be easy, and that my remix may be remixed again, as we continue to build high-quality, open source, free resources for our music history community.
