PLEASE DONT INCLUDE AN INTRODUCTION OR CONCLUSION JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION BELOW. I WILL ADD INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSION. PLEASE FOLLOW GUIDLINES BELOW : WRITING ASSIGNMENT
You are required to complete one of the following four essays—your choice—over the course of the semester. Essays must be typed, double-spaced, with one-inch margins and 12-point font. Aim to keep each essay between 250 and 400 words long. Include your name and the date, an appropriate title, and the number of the assignment (Assignment 1, Assignment 4, etc.). No paper will be accepted after its due date.
Grading Criteria:
In order to get a B or higher, you must argue from your own point of view and demonstrate that you have listened carefully to and thought about the work or works in question. I am more interested in how you support your argument than in whether you get the answer “right” or “wrong.” Do not waste time with incidental biographical information, or simply summarize what some source or other writes about these pieces. Rather, engage directly with the questions, and spend most of your essay building your support, based on what you hear and what you think. Be sure to produce your best writing, too, with a clear sense of the questions and your response (a thesis!), direct references to specific moments in the work(s) under discussion, tightly organized paragraphs, and grammatically clean sentences. For some of these essays, it may be helpful to consult outside sources, but please do so only as needed—for instance, in order to establish the proper historical context for what you want to argue. (Remember to cite your sources properly!) Again, the main argument should be yours.
Essay 4: Due April 28
Listening: Cage, Sonatas and Interludes, Sonata II.
In choosing a traditional term like “sonata” as the title for this piece, John Cage placed his work in some relation to centuries of history. By the 1940s, when Cage composed his work, there was broad audience familiarity with a whole canon of sonatas for piano by such famous composers as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and others. What relationship do you think Cage’s Sonatas have with this canonic tradition? Do you find anything in Cage’s Sonata II that would connect it to earlier piano sonatas, like those of Beethoven? If so, what? Be specific. If not, why do you suppose Cage would call his piece “sonata”?
