MUS521: Music Research and Bibliography
Model Essay Assignment
Please read the following essay, which can be found on OnCourse:
Moore, Andrea. Neoliberalism and the Musical Entrepreneur. Journal of the
Society for American Music 10, no. 1 (February 2016): 3353.
This essay will serve as a model for your research projects this semester. Thus, for our
purposes the style and structure of the essay is more important than the content. The
following questions are designed to prepare you for our in-class discussion on August 28.
Please read the essay in full and then answer the following questions. Email me your
answers prior to class and bring your answers and a copy of the essay on August 28
(electronic copies are fine).
Structure
Where does the introduction begin and end?
The Introduction takes up the first half of the page.
Critique the introduction. Does it grab your attention? Why or why
not? Does it effectively set up the rest of the essay? If so, how? If not, what would
make it better?
The introduction does grab my attention. It prepares the reader for what the rest of the
essay will cover and gives the authors viewpoint on the topic.
What is the thesis statement? Copy and paste it here.
In2012,theflutistClaireChase,founderoftheInternationalContemporaryEnsemble,
[Link]
awardsemphasisonChasesentrepreneurshipreflectsthegrowingdemandamong
classicalmusicians,educators,andcriticsforselfdrivenmusicalprojects,promotedasan
engineofclassicalmusicsconcertcultureandascrucialtoitsrenewalintheUnited
[Link]
country.
Where does the body of the essay begin and end?
The body of the essay begins on page 33 and end on page 50
Where does the conclusion begin and end?
The conclusion starts at the bottom of page 50 and ends on page 51
Critique the conclusion. What makes this a strong conclusion? Is
there anything else that youd like to see addressed? This is a strong conclusion
because it takes ideas from the body of the essay and builds on them to prove her
point.
Argument
Briefly summarize Moores argument.
Moore believes that being a musical entrepreneur is highly overrated. She believes that
the praise that comes along with being an entrepreneur in this day in age is causing more
musicians to end up in working conditons that are temporary and unstable.
How does Moore structure the argument? Does each section of the
essays body build upon the previous section? Explain.
Moore structures her argument by first, mentioning who she will be calling upon or what
facts she will be using in her essay to support her argument. Then, she uses the
information to prove her argument. Each section does build upon the previous section.
She would use the end of a section to transition into the next section.
What gives Moores argument authority? In other words, even if
we disagree with her, why is her argument worthy of being taken seriously?
Moores argument has authority because of her references and the plethora of examples.
Even if someone would disagree with her, she has excellent research and strong points
which gives her argument prestige.
Footnotes and Bibliography
Compare and contrast notes 6, 19, 25, and 26. What information do
these different types of footnotes contain?
Footnotes 6 and 25 just give the citation of the source where the information was found
while footnotes 19 and 26 give some more information about sentence. I am honestly not
sure why this was done because I have never seen something like this.
Find examples of footnotes that cite the following: a book, journal
article, website, newspaper article, and book chapter. Footnote 36 sites a website.
Footnote 6 sites a book. Footnote 7 sites a Journal article. Footnote 51 sites a
newspaper article. Footnote 25 is a book chapter
Compare and contrast the citation in footnote 6 to the entry starting
with Friedman, Milton in the bibliography on page 52.
The differences are that in footnote 6, the first name goes first, there is a parentheses
around the publisher, and it includes the page number.
Take a look at the bibliography. What sources are included in it?
All of the sources that were used in the essay are included in the bibliography.