Team Presentation Assignment (Neff)

As part of your study of 20th and 21st century music, you will work in teams to prepare a presentation to be shared in your recitation during weeks 12 and 14.

After listening (repeatedly) to your team’s piece, prepare a presentation that addresses the following:

The context: Include the composer and title in addition to when and where the music was composed. Identify the work’s genre.
Summarize the work’s (and/or movement’s) overall form, succinctly but carefully.
Agree on two or three adjectives that your team feels best describes the overall piece or movement.
3A. Support your choice of adjective by citing a specific passage in the music (use timings) and describe that passage using precise musical language. (Think about form, harmony, melody, text/music relationship (if there is a text or descriptive title), rhythm, instrumentation, etc.)

Please be sure that all team members participate in the presentation. Be sure to include audio examples in your presentation.

Teams and the length of the presentation will be determined by your recitation instructor.

This presentation is 3% of the final grade.

The works/movements for presentations are:

1. John Cage (1912–1992) , Sonata V [Listen on YouTube] from Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, completed in 1948. Here is a link to Cage’s thoughts on prepared piano (a piano which is altered by the insertion of objects into the strings): Prepared piano

2. John Adams (1947–), “Batter my Heart” [Listen on YouTube] from the opera Doctor Atomic, 2005. Synopsis of the opera. Here is the text by John Donne (1572–1631):

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’d town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,

But am betroth’d unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.