Pick a song, album, or musician. Englishman in New York.

Additional Notes - Students are free to schedule optional meetings to discuss their paper at any time. I am willing to meet at any point in the process from brain-storming to looking at drafts (though I will only do the latter in meetings, not through email), but I do ask that you give me at least 48 hours notice (72 as we get closer to the due date) so that I can ensure that students who wish to meet are able to do so. I am available during office hours 1-2 on T/F, and by appointment.

DIRECTIONS: Please choose one of the following prompts, and in four to six pages (Times New Roman size 12 font with one inch margins around the entire paper) try and answer the question as best (and as creatively) as you can. All research material must be properly cited in either MLA or Chicago format. Quotes from the material we have read in class must be parenthetically cited.
Our guide to composition and music criticism this unit has been Marc Woodworth and Ally-Jane Grossan's anthology How to Write About Music. Throughout that text they include several different prompts on ways to approach writing about music, from which the bulk of the second unit paper prompts are derived. Please pick one of the following prompts below, though note that as with the unit one paper, these are permeable, and I am perfectly amenable to consider papers which cross boundaries and prompts (though please consult with me first):
1. Find an album that you have not listened to before; it can be an album suggested by a friend or member of your family, one that you find on Spotify (or even in a store....), or one that is either mentioned in How to Write About Music or on one of the lists we've discussed. Give the album several listens, and write a review which gives both your personal impressions of the music, as well as possibly placing it in the wider context of music you are more familiar with.

2. Residents of the Washington DC metropolitan area have lots of opportunity to hear live music, from the symphony to touring top 40 bands. For this prompt attend a concert (of absolutely any genre) and write a review of the performance.

3. Albums used to be known for their "liner notes," that is the track-by-track guide to the songs on an album giving a little synopsis of them, sometimes acutely academic, sometimes very personal. These liner notes were often written by journalists, academics, or the musicians themselves. For this prompt pick one of your favorite albums or playlists, and write liner notes for each track on the album.

4. Pick a song, album, or musician that you feel intensely personally connected to in some way, whether for aesthetic or personal reasons. In an essay that incorporates information about both music and lyrics, write a personal essay which explains your attachment. You can focus on when you first heard it, important events you associate with it, or when and why you keep returning to this particular music.

5. It used to be popular to make "mix tapes" for friends and partners; that is a type of soundtrack with songs that are important to its creator that are then placed in a particular order. Now online services like Spotify have made it easy to curate a list of tracks and to send them to a friend. For this particular prompt you must pick a hypothetical person (friend, family, even somebody famous) and make a ten-song playlist for them. This paper will list the songs and the order that they appear in, with explanations for why you chose to put them on your playlist.
Feel free to send me the link to an actual Spotify playlist if you want!

6. The BBC used to have a show called "Desert Island Disks" which asked its famous guests to curate a list of five albums or songs (in no particular order) that they could not live without; tracks that were so important to them that they'd be the ones that they would take with them to a desert island (hence the name). For this prompt think of what five examples of music are central to you, and why. Music which is "central" to you may not necessarily be your favorite music, but rather music that you'd want to have access to for some reason.