2.1 Finding and evaluating resources for music inquiries

This inquiry -style module guides you through the process of locating and evaluating resources that might be useful in an inquiry about music. It is meant to serve both as practice in how to do a formal inquiry and also as a specific orientation to the Investigate step of an inquiry. After doing this inquiry, you should have a better idea of the types of resources that will be available and useful to you in your own inquiries about music.

Ask

This inquiry will actually focus on two questions. The main question is: what kinds of resources can I find to answer my questions about music, and how useful will they be in answering my questions?

In order to explore the answer to that question, you should choose a question about music to use as a focus for this investigation. This inquiry will be most useful if you choose a question that:

1. Is a good question for a formal inquiry (see Designing Inquiry Questions );
2. Is about a musical tradition, genre, style, composer, or performer that you would like to know more about; and
3. May have more than one reasonable answer. This inquiry asks you to consider the relative trustworthiness of different sources. This is a much more interesting exercise when some sources give different answers. Is there a confusion that you have about music because different sources appear to give different answers? Do you know of a controversy, for example, about how to perform a certain style of music, how to learn a certain skill, or how to categorize a certain composer's work? Or can you think of a question that might be answered differently by experts in different music traditions?

Investigate

There are several different, interconnected challenges involved in locating useful learning resources:

• Finding relevant information
• Evaluating the relationship of the information to your investigation
• Connecting with and understanding the information
• Organizing and internalizing the knowledge

The following investigation invites you to consciously think about each of these problems as you search for answers to your question.

Finding relevant information

There are many different types of sources of knowledge about music. You will probably find some easier to understand, more useful, or more persuasive than others. (See Ways of Knowing About Music .) In this first step, you are simply looking for information that seems to be relevant to your investigation. It might contain an answer to your question, or someone's opinion about the answer, or definitions or examples that will help you understand the answer, or facts or discussions that would be useful in comparing different answers or constructing an answer for yourself.

For this investigation, try to find at least one relevant resource from each of the following categories . If you find it frustratingly difficult to find any particular type of resource, you can skip that category; but every time you skip a category, substitute a second resource from an easy-to-find category. For example, if there are no local experts available, but video lectures are easy to find, choose two video lectures and skip the local expert. You should have nine resources in all.