Assignment Description for Third Major Paper:

1. Your sources for this paper will be Allan Bloom’s chapter “Music” from his book The Closing of the American Mind as well as Simon Frith’s essay “Toward an Aesthetic of Popular Music.”

2. Your paper should be well over four pages. It is worth 15% of your final grade. A first draft is due Tuesday 3/13. A final draft, with peer critique attached, is due Thursday 3/15.

3. I expect you to employ near-perfect use of summary, paraphrase, direct quote, and proper in-text citation, all while avoiding plagiarism.

4. Bloom and Frith have complex ideas about popular music. Although neither one mentions the other in his writing, your job is to bring them into a dialogue with one another. After a second reading of each essay, it should be clear to you that they would disagree on many points. Perhaps you will find some similarities in their arguments as well. In any case, you need to identify what you feel to be the most interesting aspects of each author’s argument and to then find some way to bring those different aspects together into one discussion.

4. Possible Helpful Structure: Using the skills of summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation, spend a page and a half introducing your reader to what you feel to be Bloom’s most engaging arguments. Then, spend another page and a half bringing Frith into the conversation. Just as you did for Bloom, you will want to use the skills of summary, paraphrase, and direct quotations to introduce your reader to Frith’s most interesting points; but you will also want to begin identifying the essential places at which these two authors can be made to “talk” to one another.

5. Questions to Consider: What ideas seem most interesting to you in these essays? Both Bloom and Frith are trying to improve our understanding of the power of music: how does either man change the way you might look at popular music? Can Frith be used to refute Bloom’s argument? Can Bloom be used to make Frith’s claims seem dubious? Despite their differences, do the two men seem to have any ideas in common? What do you think is to be learned by examining these two men’s ideas?