Saddleback College
Humanities 10A: Culture, Science, Society I
Spring 2012 Syllabus
Scott Farthing, D.M.A
sfarthing@saddleback.edu
949.582.4751 (email is faster)
FA 110
Alannah Orrison Rosenberg, Ph.D.
arosenberg@saddleback.edu
949.582.4854 (email is faster)
BGS 348
Scope
The scope of this course will cover approximately nine hundred and twelve years of Western societal
attitudes toward music as a product and its commercialization. Humanities 10A in general is a course
about renaissances, and our focus this semester will be on art reborn as commerce.
Discussion will be carried around questions such as;
1. When does music become a commodity for monetary exchange?
2. What are the factors that allow music to become a product to sell another product?
3. When and where does western society start selling music as entertainment?
4. What is the historical development of music for the elite versus music for the masses?
5. How does music become intellectual property?
6. How are Lady Gaga and Georg Friederich Handel alike?
7. Who owns a song?
Class discussion will begin in the aural tradition of a simple song in the Europe of 1100 and close with
the 2012 globalization of a tangible product that can generate millions of dollars in a single day. Our
exploration will delve into a time when a community only learned news through a traveling musician,
where every member of a town knew the same few songs and successive generations added their own
verses, and a culture when people stop making music of their own and start letting other people
generate music for them.
You will be listening to music from a wide range of time periods and genres and will be expected to
listen beyond “what you like” to the greater context of the cultural significance of a work. While this is
not a music history course, this will be a class that deals directly with the history of music both as a
tangible and intangible product. Each student will be challenged to comprehend music with the skill set
of an “active listener,” that is listening beyond the obvious and to the nuance of each sound.
Required Reading/Assignments
Because of the specificity of this course, we will be compiling handouts from many sources to enhance
our class discussion. You will be assigned videos, music, and musical scores to study outside of class as
well. We also encourage you to start “reading around the topic.” For example: if we are listening to the
music of Palestrina, start researching other composers of the same time period and familiarize yourself
his contemporaries. One book will be used a bit later in the semester for theoretical background:
Economics and Culture, by David Throsby, paperback edition 2001 from Cambridge University Press.
ISBN-13: 978-0521586399.
In addition, we may post videos on YouTube, the class Blackboard site at http://socccd.blackboard.com/,
or ask you to watch or listen to performances as preparation for class discussion.
Grading
20%
50%
30%
Class participation (including classwork and homework)
Exams (10% Midterm#1, 15% Midterm #2, 25% Final)
Argumentative thesis term paper, with outline/draft and annotated bibliography preparation.
If you don’t hear about an assignment because you were absent, and you don’t make the effort to find
out about it in a timely fashion, you simply miss the points. We reserve the right to accept or refuse late
items, or to do so at a discount. Since we meet only once a week, missing a class means missing a large
and probably unrecoverable amount of material.
Exams will be almost exclusively by essay. For each exam, bring two exam booklets. If you miss a
midterm, we may or may not, increase the weight of the final exam or provide an alternate midterm
during the finals week, or you may simply miss the points. You do not have any “right” to make up a
missed exam.
Expected Competencies
Humanities 10 is not only an Honors course, it is the core Honors course. It is because of the rigors of
this course that our transfer partners allow you to take only five Honors classes while many other
community colleges require six. Humanities 10 demands strong reading, writing and critical thinking
skills. Expect to be challenged.
Reading: The materials we will be using are not introductory textbooks with summaries, brightly
highlighted Student Learning Outcomes, etc. you will have to read thoughtfully, taking your own notes.
Writing: Individuals who have completed English 1A and 1B have a distinct advantage in the
Honors Humanities core courses, and for this reason we encourage students not to take this course in
their first year. Essay exams, a paper, and other written projects will be assigned. You should be able to
write argumentative and critical essays rather than simple descriptive ones.
Critical Thinking: Identification, description, summarization and reporting are all necessary skills
to success in any college course, but here they are not sufficient. In an Honors course, we expect you to
demonstrate skills such as analysis, comparison, contrast, interpretation, differentiation, evaluation,
discussion and even discovery. (Example: knowing the difference between monophony, homophony,
and polyphony is on the level of what is “necessary.” Higher-order thinking might be analyzing the ways
in which these distinct compositional tools were used to affect specific reactions of the listener.
Academic Honesty
Any breach of academic honesty may result in an F on an assignment or for the entire course;
dishonesty on one assignment will throw into doubt all good performance on other assignments. We
will also submit Academic dishonesty Reports to the College. Be aware that you may not be certified as
an Honors program student or participate in any Honors program transfer agreements with a record of
academic dishonesty.
We will review what plagiarism is, which we do NOT expect you to know beforehand, bet we expect you
to behave accordingly thereafter. If you are in any doubt as to what constitutes cheating on an in-class
exam, please let us know. If you ever find yourself asking the question, “is this close enough to be
plagiarism?” the answer is “yes.”Do not share your work with others or ask others to share their work
with you unless you know we have explicitly allowed this within the context of a group assignment of
some kind.
Accommodations for Students with Disabilities
If you have a documented disability and need accommodations for this class, please see us as soon as
possible. If you have a disability but have not worked through Saddleback’s DSPS office, do that
immediately, since all accommodation must be made through them. Phone: 949.582.4885. Website:
http://www.saddleback.edu/dsps/