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Editor's note: This is the second in an occasional series of stories on efforts to enhance undergraduate education at Carolina.
Listen to the cacophony wafting from the second-floor window of Hill Hall
in early November and you get a sense of what Noah might have heard as he
herded the animals onto the ark.
The assortment of snorts, toots and honks emanate from wind instruments
crafted by freshman students taking the first-year seminar "The Interplay of
Music and Physics" taught by physics professor Laurie McNeil and cellist Brent
Wissick, associate professor of music.
In this class, 12 students have learned how instruments make sound and how
those instruments and the music they make have evolved from the 12th century to
today.
Like music itself, the course is a mixture of the objective and the
subjective, the technical and the sublime.
And that's where the making of the instruments comes in: Each student has
had to combine the science and musical history they've learned to design a wind
and a string instrument of their own.
"Instead of memorizing notes from a lecture, they are being asked to
construct their own knowledge through their own experience," McNeil
says.
Students have had to understand they need a source of sound, such as a
plucked string. But they also need to know the string will produce no sound
without a bridge that can carry that sound into a resonating chamber, and that
the size of that chamber will determine what frequencies can be
amplified.
There are lessons to be learned by making wind instruments as well.
McNeil explains, for instance, how different sounds are produced by the
shape and length of the instrument, or by the size and placement of the holes
cut into it.
McNeil says making instruments allows students to "possess" knowledge in
ways they may never have done before.
Here, success or failure is not measured by the answer you circled on a
test but by whether the instrument you made works. And even failure to make an
instrument that works presents the chance to figure out something students
already thought they knew.
Or as McNeil puts it: "Showing is better than telling, and doing is better
than hearing about it."
In early December, the students will be called on to show how much they
know when they play their instruments, with music they've composed, in a public
concert in Person Hall. And the music must be written to include at least one
other accompanying instrument.
No pressure, you understand, but Wissick and McNeil billed the event on
the course syllabus as "The Grand Finale."
But in a way, the pressure of this event will be as much on McNeil and
Wissick as their students. How well their students perform will be a measure of
what they've taught them.
And Wissick, as a professional musician, already knows a thing or two
about stage fright. "In my own funny way, I'm almost as nervous for them as
they should be," he says.
Jump-starting the intellect
The course was one of 37 similar experiments started this fall as a
part of Carolina's First Year Initiative. These first-year seminars are an
attempt, as McNeil put it, "to jump-start the intellectual experience" for
students who come to campus with only a summer separating them from high
school.
In the past, newly arrived students might only be herded into lecture
halls that, to many of them, might have seemed as big as Noah's ark -- and
nearly as imposing.
In such a setting, the instructor seemed little more than a talking head,
there only to dispense information into students' brains that they would later
be asked to repeat on a test.
And the result, too often, was that students came to value more than
learning other aspects of campus life that they were introduced to, said Tom
Tweed, the founding director of the First Year Seminar Program who teaches in
religious and American studies.
"The athletics were important to them," Tweed said. "Dorm life was
important to them, and if they were lucky enough to get a good instructor or
two, that was important to them.
"But they weren't really brought into actively learning about the
excitement of the whole intellectual process. They had no clue why all these
professors did what they did, I think, until maybe their junior or senior
year."
First-year seminars try to ignite students' interest in the life of the
mind sooner rather than later, Tweed said. The seminars do that by joining
small groups of freshmen with some of the University's top professors and
researchers.
Wissick said most students arrive at the University driven to succeed.
They had to be to get the grades and the scores to gain entry. The trick, now
that they're here, is to show them how learning has value apart from its
utilitarian purpose.
In his 17 years of teaching at the University, Wissick has had the
pleasure of seeing students come to that point between their freshman and
senior years.
"The whole excitement of this class has been watching a group of freshmen
come to that realization sooner," Wissick said.
Other professors such as Leon Fink, Leo Zonn and Jan Boxill said
first-year seminars have been as fun for them as for their students. And,
sometimes, as educational.
Fink is a labor historian now researching and writing about the Mayan
Indians of Guatemala and their recent migration to the United States. It's also
the topic he chose to teach to the 17 students taking his first-year seminar
"Five Hundred Years Without Solitude: The Guatemalan Maya and the Politics of
Resistance."
For an academician, that's sort of like walking a tightrope without a net.
It's easy to stumble onto something you don't yet know. But it also allows for
a sense of discovery for both the professor and the students, Fink said.
"A class like this opens up the chance to take more risks," Fink said.
"I'm introducing this to them even as I'm exploring new territory.
"From my angle, I make up in energy and enthusiasm what I might lack in
scholarly depth."
Fink took his students to talk with Mayan Indians who work as laborers in
Morganton. Some of the students asked better questions than he did. One asked,
for instance, how the exodus has affected their home villages.
The answer the student received was multi-layered, Fink said. On the one
hand, some villagers have seen their standards of living increase because of
money mailed from relatives working in the United States.
On the other hand, that increased flow of money has inflated the costs of
things. And that inflation hurts villagers who aren't getting money from
relatives.
Zonn, a geographer, titled his class "Representations of the American
Landscape." The idea of the class is to teach students about geography as it is
used by American filmmakers to evoke a sense of time and place.
One film that students examined in this way was Falling Down with Michael
Douglas, a film that explores the fragile, frightening and sometimes violent
world of freeway-dominated Los Angeles in the 1980s.
Zonn began the class by asking students to write a paper on a place that
had been the most important to them in their own lives. Some wrote about
churches. Some wrote about their grandmothers' kitchens. Others wrote about
their bedrooms.
Many of the papers captured what those places meant to students and, in
doing so, revealed something real and important about themselves, Zonn said.
Students used those insights to better understand the lengths to which
filmmakers go to use a sense of place to add power, mood and depth to their
stories.
Zonn said the class has been a way to get to know what students think
before they acquire the hard veneer of sophistication of juniors and seniors.
They're open and vulnerable in ways he finds refreshing.
"I don't want to say they have a naiveté because that sounds too
patronizing," Zonn said. "Innocence is a word I like better. It has helped us
to understand what people are thinking at this age, and it is very different.
They are not politically active or astute."
Boxill, a philosophy professor, titled her seminar "Issues in a World
Society: Sports and Competition."
Some of her students started out thinking that if they weren't taking
notes or preparing for a test, they weren't learning anything.
"I had the hardest time getting them to put their pens down," Boxill
said.
Her next task was to get them to open their mouths and minds.
She asked questions meant to turn upside down the way students had grown
up thinking about sports and competition. Do athletics belong on campus? Should
athletes be role models? Should Title 9 be used to achieve gender
equity?
Some students took her to task for raising questions they always had been
happy to ignore. As they saw it, sports is the mindless escape many people need
to forget the cares of the real world.
"They are too fragile in a sense because they haven't really thought a lot
about many of these things," Boxill said. "Doing it in a comfortable setting
makes it a little less intimidating."
Tweed said the seminars are not so much aimed at changing what students
think but how.
"A lot of the literature about first-year students, especially about their
cognitive stages, suggests that most first-year students are at a cognitive
level where they are more used to more absolutist ways of thinking," Tweed
said. "Part of what the first-year seminars can do is accelerate the process
where they begin to realize there are multiple perspectives on a particular
issue, that there is often not one simple or single answer. Life is messy and
intellectual life is messy."
As well-received as the seminars have been, they will never be able to
replace the large lecture, Tweed said. There are simply too few faculty members
to go around for too many freshmen.
Still, Tweed said, nearly half of the freshmen had the chance to take a
seminar in Fall 1999. The goal is to make as many spaces available as freshmen
want, Tweed said.
"My hunch is this will be around for a long time."
Next semester, Tweed will get into the act with his own seminar, "Buddhism
and the Beastie Boys."
Cider and cinnamon
It's another class in early November, only this time the majestic
sounds of Brandenburg Concerto #2 float from Hill Hall's second-floor
window.
Wissick, as a cellist, has done much work with Renaissance and Baroque
music. In this session, he lets students hear for themselves how composers such
as Johann Sebastian Bach created music for the instruments of their
time.
Wissick tells the class that the Brandenburg piece is a "fugal imitation
that is a lot farther along than `Row, Row, Row Your Boat.'"
A fugue, according to the dictionary, is "a polyphonic musical composition
in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering
voices and parts." A polyphony is defined as a "style of musical composition in
which two or more independent melodies are juxtaposed in harmony."
Wissick starts out by playing a CD of the piece performed with the
instruments from the Baroque period for which Bach composed it.
The first movement begins with a group of solo instruments playing. Called
the "concertino," the group features a trumpet, recorder, oboe and violin. The
accompanying group, called the "ripieno," features violins, violas, violones,
cellos and harpsichord.
The second movement begins with a solo trumpet, followed by the entrance
of the oboe, then violin, then recorder.
When the second movement ends, Wissick asks the class, "Did they seem like
they were having a conversation that was related?"
After the students respond, Wissick plays Brandenburg a second time but
with brass instruments of today. He asks students if the conversation they
heard between these instruments was any different.
And once again, they respond. The variety of comments verifies what
they've learned in a previous class from a visiting psycho-acoustics research
professor. He explained how people can listen to the same sounds and still
experience them differently.
Yes, the professor told them, musical notes can be measured by precise
mathematical data. Yet, he said, perceptions of that data are more
idiosyncratic. The beauty in music, in other words, is found in the ear of the
beholder.
Wissick, for instance, hears the Brandenburg piece, when played with the
period instruments, as a "dialogue between instruments."
The instruments' warm, subtle sounds almost seem able to imitate human
voices, and the notes they make seem to stay in balance with each other as if
they're talking to one another.
Most of the students hear it the same way.
Using some of the vocabulary they've picked up from Wissick in earlier
classes, students talk about the differences in "color" and "texture" of the
instruments.
The natural trumpet used in the Baroque period, for instance, has a more
intimate, plaintive sound. It's like the modern trumpet but lacks the valves
that allow the player to change the length of the tubing to change pitch. The
modern brass trumpet, in contrast, sounds more heroic and bold.
One student puts it this way: "It's like the trumpet is saying, `Hey,
let's have a conversation -- and I'm in charge.'"
Yet another student compares the competing sounds made by the modern brass
instruments to the taste of cinnamon in cider. "It was like it wasn't as
well-blended," she says.
Wissick views the conversation between instruments playing the Brandenburg
as a metaphor for what he and McNeil are attempting to accomplish with their
students.
Rather than trumpet their expertise in one-sided lectures, Wissick and
McNeil find ways to share what they know in a way that invites an interplay
with students.
This seminar, because of its interdisciplinary approach joining science
and the arts, offers another dimension: a chance for two colleagues to learn
something new from each other.
Wissick, before coming to Carolina, taught part-time at a small college
and part-time at a high school, and he continues to visit high schools for
clinics on playing stringed instruments.
Roughly half of what he does now as the cello professor for the University
is to give private lessons. That experience, McNeil believes, gives Wissick a
greater ability to look inside students' heads and see what they're
thinking.
"Very often Brent will say, `What so and so is really struggling with is
this,' and I'll say, `Right! Why didn't I see that.'
"Learning to do that with my own physics students will make me a far
better teacher."
For both, the biggest kick has been combining their knowledge to produce
insights for students they could never have generated alone. Sometimes, they
even surprise themselves.
"This is so much fun it should be illegal," McNeil says.
The Grand Finale
In their instructions to the class on making instruments, Wissick
and McNeil give students one key piece of advice: They tell them where to find
Knight Campbell Hardware store.
The names of all the instruments listed in the Dec. 2 program offer ample
proof that they've found the hardware store but ended up in different
aisles.
Materials range from a sewer pipe to a skateboard to a frying pan.
McNeil and Wissick also tell students that they're not expecting a
multi-movement symphony and remind students that Mozart managed to do some
nifty things with a piece that was the equivalent of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little
Star."
Here, too, it's clear students have paid attention.
Catherine Carter, with her PVC flute, and Anne Catherine Kruger, with her
flexi-panpipes, start things off with back-to-back duets. The first number is
Carter's adaptation of "Sine Forma." The second piece, titled "Lullaby for
Sewage Pipe Flutes," is Kruger's creation.
They're followed by the trio of John Kartz on his "skatar" (a guitar made
from a skateboard), Ken Varner on his "whang-jo" (a banjo-like instrument made
with a metal bucket for the body and a 2 x 4 for the neck) and Ben Mappen on
his sewage pipe. Their ditty is titled "Blues in Question Mark."
The "Variations on the Theme from Beverly Hillbillies" is bumped to the
end of the concert, and it doesn't take long to figure out why.
The piece is performed by Matt Martin on his "sledola da gamba" (made from
a broom and a plastic sled) and Ken Varner on his whang-jo.
And unlike all the others, this composition comes with lyrics, composed
and sung by Martin.
He starts with the words, "Now here's a little story about a freshman
seminar ..."
By the time Martin finishes, his audience is sold. Another Brandenburg
Concerto? Hardly. It might not qualify as black gold or Texas tea,
either.
But to Wissick and McNeil, the ditty seems a fitting way to cap this
four-month-long experiment. And to their ears, at least, these concoctions of
sound may even carry the hint of cider and cinnamon, finely stirred.
Hear for yourself
To hear the culminating concert of the first-year seminar "The Interplay
of Music and Physics," go to
ttp://www.unc.edu/courses/engl042/freshmanseminar.ram
To hear excerpts from "Variations on the Theme from Beverly Hillbillies"
and "Blue Danube," go to http://www.unc.edu/courses/engl042/excerpts.ram
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