http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/page-two/music-theory/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HybridPed+%28Hybrid+Pedagogy%3A+A+Digital+Journal+of+Teaching+%26+Technology%29

“What is Music Theory?” This article immediately stood out to me on the site because the article group that I am in is hip hop and literacy and I thought this article could sort of tie in with that. The articles main point was to explain what music theory is and why it is important. Music theory is defined in the article as “a discipline, in which we study multiple theories about multiple musics. Individual pieces of music cluster together into styles, and each style has a diversity of theories around it.” In other words what traits define certain categories of music and what makes up certain kinds of songs (common themes, common rhythms, common instruments/sounds used). Musical theories are ever-changing because music is ever changing and the purpose of the theories is that “They provide a set of norms against which we can interpret the meaning of the ways in which specific composers or songwriters follow or deviate from those norms.” Music theory is important because “understanding the heavily contextual nature of musical styles helps us understand not only why Bach and Brahms are different, but also why some people who care deeply about music don’t give either Bach or Brahms a second thought.” It helps us understand why some people choose to listen to hip hop and why others choose country, both extremely different genres of music.

I found this article very interesting and I definitely think it ties into my group article of hip hop and literacy. Music theory is a very interesting concept and it breaks down music piece by piece so that you can learn why certain genres of music follow or don’t follow certain patterns and you also learn about all of the different types of reading, writing, and overall word analysis that go into creating a song and album.

The book that our group chose was “Just Girls” by Margaret J. Finders. Every member in our group is a girl so this made the book easily relatable to all of us and immediately we all started discussing the negative and positive things that happened to us in junior high that were either similair or exactly alike the stories that were described in the book. The chapter that I could relate to the most was Chapter 2 about yearbooks. I remember being in Junior highschool and how the yearbook was one of the biggest events of the year and how me and all of my friends could not wait to get it. We were like the girls described in the book who would count every picture that we were in and would carefully think out our signature and what we would write in everyone else’s yearbooks and what they would write in ours. It’s crazy looking back to how much the yearbook mattered to me in those days and how the yearbook is the biggest sanctioned literacy event of the year. Reading this book has helped me understand literacy better and it is very interesting reading this book and being able to relate to it so much and now see how literacy played such a huge role in junior high and high-school. What you read and what you write does play a huge role in these grade levels and this book helps you better understand and explore the secretive literate practices that occur in the classroom at that age.