Discussion 1 – Why music? Why jazz?
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I have three groups of questions for you to begin with this week.
- What are you doing here? Why are you bothering to take a music class?
- Why does music even exist? What does music accomplish? Or, maybe the most straightforward way of asking this: Why did we invent music?
- When you think of “jazz,” what comes to mind? What sorts of stereotypes or clichés do you attach to jazz? (☜ This could be anything: specific instruments, places, people, time periods … anything.)
This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. Primarily, I think it’s interesting because is actually kind of a “waste of time.” From a purely evolutionary standpoint, music doesn’t really make all that much sense. There are lots of “better,” more “useful” things you can do with your time and energy, so why did we invent it?
There are clearly no “correct” answers to these questions, so don’t worry about that. I mostly want you to think a bit about these ideas. Please respond with a few sentences that explain your thoughts on these two sets of questions.
(A full-credit answer will write at least two sentences addressing each of the bullet points, above.)