WOMEN AND MUSIC IN THE 16TH CENTURY. Music History. Term Paper

How to Write a Music History Term Paper (adapted from http://courses.music.indiana.edu/m401/M401how2.html#area)
1. Select a Subject Area
The first step in writing your paper is to find a subject area you are interested in. 
For starters, look at the course themes that are listed on the syllabus. Which of these interest you most? Which might you enjoy exploring? Often the most successful papers are those that tackle a big question, like these themes, by looking at a case study. For instance, you might explore the last theme, music and its interaction with other arts, by examining how this happens in a particular place and time, such as Venice around 1600, Paris around 1680, or Leipzig in 1722. 
To help you consider possible topics, look around and ahead in Concise History of Western Music, including the timelines that are provided in every chapter; the sidebars that highlight music in its context, performance issues, composer biographies, and source readings; and the "For Further Reading" section at the end of the book. Listen to the music we will be covering this semester, or to other music from this period. Browse in the Check the library for general sources, always proceeding from the most general to the most specific . Grove online is particularly good.  Specialist histories and anthologies on a period or topic that interests you. Are the next step.  Look at the list of Some Suggested Subject Areas. Select a few general areas you might be interested in pursuing, and get to know them. I would be happy to help you refine your idea.. 
Settle on one subject area as soon as you can. But don't do this too soon. Before you commit yourself to a subject, you should (1) know it well enough and (2) have gathered enough material on it to be sure that you can write a successful paper. You do not want to discover a week before the paper is due that the library has too few sources on your area. 
2. Get to Know Your Subject Area
Look carefully at the bibliographies in Grove Online, which give more specific sources on your areas. Read around in the literature on your subject area or areas. Read quickly, without taking copious notes (there's time for that later). If a subject involves specific pieces of music (such as Monteverdi's operas Orfeo and Poppea ), get familiar with those pieces; if it involves a repertoire (such as troubadour songs), listen to and look at enough examples to have a sense of what the repertoire is like.3. Build a Bibliography
An important part of getting to know a subject area is building a bibliography. Your bibliography is simply the list of sources you use in writing your paper. So the process of building a bibliography and the process of getting to know your subject area will happen in tandem, and you will continue to expand your bibliography as you write your paper. From the start, become familiar with the format for bibliographic citations as described in The Chicago Manual of Style (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/01/) This is the format you will have to use for your bibliography in each assignment. You will save time and effort in the long run by taking time early on to become familiar with the required format for each type of item and by consistently using the correct format. 
4. Select a Specific TopicMost students start with areas that are too broad for a short paper.  As you work, you should limit yourself to a specific topic. Topics can be limited in one or more of the following ways, or others:• Period of time • Geography or nationality • Genre, text, or repertoire • Musical technique • Person or group of people • Number of pieces covered Select a specific topic based on your interests and the information you are finding. You should select just one thing to write about, and let go of all the other interesting ideas you have developed along the way. Write down the limits of your topic. You should be able to describe your topic in one to four sentences. If not, you may be trying to do too much in one paper. Continue to build your bibliography. 5. Figure Out What to SayAfter you have hit upon a topic and become familiar with it, you really have to start thinking. You have to figure out what to say about it. There are two main kinds of writing in the field of music history: (1) writing that summarizes existing knowledge on a topic, like an encyclopedia article or a passage in a textbook, and (2) writing that states a thesis (a main idea) and presents an argument to support that thesis. The goal of this paper is the second type, not the first. Here you must try to come up with something to say about your topic--and again, only one thing. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR PAPER! Notice that in a research paper you are not writing a "report." Simply rehashing what someone else has said or a bunch of data or telling us your feelings or anything else is not a research paper. You must say something. The rest of the discussion below is focused on figuring out what to say and how to argue for your thesis. 6. Formulate Your ThesisAfter you've decided what you're going to say about the subject, write it out as one sentence. This is the thesis of your essay. A thesis is a one-sentence statement of your main point. It is a full sentence: for example, "Seventeenth-century Italian composers of violin sonatas often imitated the style, ornamentation, and rhetorical gestures of vocal music." It is not a sentence fragment ("The relation between violin music and vocal music in the seventeenth century"). Notice that the sentence fragment doesn't say anything, it only names the topic. The complete sentence says something, something that is specific and can be proven (or disproven).The thesis is often the answer to some question that you have asked about the topic. If you aren't sure yet what the answer will be, but you know what question you would like to ask, start with the question, and the thesis will develop as you try to answer the question. Of all the dozens of things you know about your subject, you may legitimately choose a thesis that addresses only one of them.7. Plan Your Argument and Gather Evidence for Your ThesisTry to come up with reasons why you believe your thesis. That is, try to find arguments for what you believe. When you have some, write them down in a kind of list.At this point, go back to the books, articles, dissertations, music, and whatever else you are using as sources for your paper. Don't read every word or analyze every note. Instead, look for more reasons to believe your thesis, bits of information that can serve as evidence to support your main point. Jot these down, and note where you found them. You might also keep your eye out for reasons someone might NOT believe your thesis; you will need these later. (And if any of them persuade you, you may want to revise your thesis to account for them. Remember, you're a human being, and human beings reserve the right to change their minds.)Using this new information, revise your list of reasons to believe your thesis. Try to make the order of the list reflect the logical order of your thought. Imagine that you are trying to convince your best friend to believe your thesis: would you start with the most convincing reasons first, or save them for last? Try to find the most persuasive order for making the case that we should all believe your thesis.8. Draft the First ParagraphYou are now ready to write the first paragraph of your paper.  Copy down your thesis. Then write another sentence that begins something like "I will demonstrate this by arguing that . . . " and then copy down your list of reasons to believe your thesis.  Your first paragraph should present your thesis and summarize your argument. Do not "introduce" or "present background" or anything else, unless it is absolutely necessary to do so before your reader is likely to understand what the thesis is saying. After you finish a preliminary draft of the whole paper, you may want to edit for style and clarity, and you may need to state briefly the problem you are trying to solve before presenting your thesis (which then gets put in your second or third paragraph), but forge on for now.9. Draft the ArgumentTake the first reason or the first step in your reasoning in your list (from step 7 above) and "develop" it. That is, tell us why it argues for your thesis, why you believe it (you may have to make another little list), and so on. Try to write a paragraph (or more) to explain what this is and to argue for its truth. Then do the same for the other items on your list. If you've done the initial list in a logical order, your whole paper will have a logical and convincing organization to it. After having said as best you can what you wanted to say, you should consider objections that someone else might raise against what you've said. You may have noted some of these during step 7. How can you reply to these objections? Think again of trying to convince your friend. (This is known in the trade as "anticipating objections," and no argument is complete without this step.) At this point you should have a good idea of what you are trying to say and you should have a fairly clear sense of how you are going to argue for your thesis. 10. Go Back to Your Sources and Revise, Revise, ReviseJust as in step 7 you went back to your sources with your thesis in mind, looking for reasons to believe it, you may find it helpful to do so again. Once again, don't get bogged down in superfluous information; instead, go looking for things that will sharpen your argument. (This is a good reason to start writing early on; as soon as you know what you are trying to say, there is a lot you can skip over, instead of reading everything you find. This can save a lot of time.) Now that your argument is developing in your own mind, you may see things you missed before. What evidence exists for each of your supporting points? What objections to your thesis might be raised by the writers of the books and articles you are reading, if they were looking over your shoulder as you write your paper? And what evidence does what you are reading or the music you are studying offer to counter any objections? If anything new turns up, incorporate it into the sections of your paper in which you develop your argument and anticipate objections.11. If It Doesn't Relate to Your Thesis, Leave It OUTNotice that the focus is on convincing the reader of your thesis. Leave out anything that does not help to prove your thesis. Do not say everything you know about the subject. Do not give a composer's biography or "analyze" a piece just because you think you have to. You don't have to do anything that doesn't provide evidence for your argument or provide context so that the reader understands what you're talking about and why your thesis is important. If some aspect of the composer's biography or of the way the piece is made is relevant, use it as evidence for your thesis, and explain what about it supports your thesis. One exception to this rule: if it seems to contradict your thesis, you have to deal with it. Just as a lawyer arguing a case cannot simply ignore contradictory evidence, you should not either. The point is not to distract the reader with irrelevant background material or unnecessary details. 12. Ending the PaperYou are now at the end of your paper. Now, most people want to summarize their paper at the end. You have already summarized your paper in your first paragraph. Do not do it again at the end. Instead, tell us the significance of what you have said. Explain why it is important, or tell us what paper remains to be written now that this one is finished. Try to imagine that your reader asks you the killer questions "So what?" and "Who cares?" and missed the significance of what you have said. Answer those questions.13. Revise for Style and Smoothness, Make Sure the Format is Correct, and Type It NeatlyBefore finalizing your paper, check the Research Paper Style Sheet below to make sure you are not making any of the common errors in style and format. Please follow the guidelines there for writing, style, and presentation, including musical examples, quotations, and appropriate citation. Make sure that you have credited everything to its source, have enclosed quoted text in quotation marks or set it off as a block quotation, and have not inadvertently plagiarized anything. See the Chicago Manual of Style to make sure your citation style is correct for both your notes and your bibliographyResearch Project Style SheetThis style sheet addresses many of the problems students encounter most frequently in writing. Please read this through and apply these suggestions as you polish your paper. In commenting on your paper, your instructor or your peers may refer to some of these points by number, to save writing out the same advice repeatedly. Some of the suggestions below are borrowed from William Strunk, Jr.'s The Elements of Style (ES). References are to Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed., revised by Wayne C. Booth et al. You may find it helpful to buy a copy of this book if you refer to it often.
I. WritingStyle and clarity1. Use active voice: "Use the active voice. It is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive." (ES)2. Use concrete language: "Use definite, specific, concrete language. Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract." (ES)3. Make positive statements: "Put statements in positive form. Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language." (ES)4. Omit needless words: "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he or she avoid all detail and treat his or her subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." (ES)5. Strive for clarity: Bad word order creates confusion. Construct your sentences and paragraphs in a manner that conveys the idea with the greatest clarity. Keep related words together. Keep your style simple and clear.6. Thesis: In a research paper, make sure that a thesis is stated clearly near the beginning. Each part of the paper should support the thesis in some way, and the relation of each paragraph to the overall argument for your thesis should be clear.Specific points of style7. Contractions: Do not use contractions (isn't, can't, etc.) in formal expository prose.8. "Is that": This construction usually means that the true subject of the sentence follows "that," and the entire sentence should accordingly be reversed or restructured.9. Numbers and dates: When referring to numbered items (such as musical examples, stanzas, measures, lines, and so forth), use numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) rather than words (one, two, three, etc.). Otherwise, it is better in most cases to spell out the number ("There are three main reasons"; "In the sixteenth century") except for dates (1492). On the proper use of numbers in dates, see Turabian 23.3.10. Parallelism: All elements in a series should be parallel. In the sentence "We ate hot dogs, brownies, and played frisbee," the series begins as if it is going to be a list of foods we ate, but the third item ("played frisbee") is a different thing entirely: not a food, and not even a noun, as are hotdogs and brownies, but a verb phrase, with a new verb and a noun. This third item is not parallel with the other two. Recast the sentence so parallel construction is observed: "We ate hot dogs and brownies and played frisbee." Here "hot dogs" and "brownies" are parallel nouns, sharing the subject and verb "We ate," and "ate hot dogs and brownies" and "played frisbee" are parallel verb phrases, sharing the subject "We."11. This: The pronoun "this," referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or clause, cannot always carry the load and so may produce an imprecise statement. Always make sure that what a pronoun (such as "this") refers to is absolutely clear.12. Titles: Titles of complete pieces are generally italicized (or underlined) and component parts placed in quotation marks (e.g., "Hallelujah Chorus" from Messiah). Use headline-style capitalization for titles, capitalizing every word except for articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, but, or), and prepositions (of, in at, to, and the like), unless they appear as the first or last word of a title or subtitle, in which case they must be capitalized. See Turabian 2.23.13. Underlining and italics: Use either italics or underlining, but not both. They are both signs for the same things, titles and emphasis, and should not be used together (or even in the same paper). Punctuation14. Commas: In a series of three or more items, it is American formal style to use commas to separate them, including a comma before the "and": red, white, and blue. (Newspapers and the English do it differently.)15. Dash: Do not put a space before or after a dash. If your word processor allows you to make a long dash called an em-dash—like this—please use it. Otherwise, make a dash with two hyphens--as here--and not with one. A single hyphen links two words into a compound word, as in "note-against-note organum."16. Possessives: "Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant" (e.g., Brahms's, Ives's). (ES) See Turabian 20.2 for the very few exceptions. Foreign languages17. Foreign words: Foreign words are italicized or underlined (e.g., piacevolezza), unless they have come into common usage in English (e.g., cafe, etude, cantus firmus). See Turabian 22.2.1.18. Diacritical marks: Diacritical marks (such as the umlaut in Schütz) in foreign names or words cannot be omitted; they are as much a part of the spelling as the letters. If the computer you are using cannot produce them, they must be added by hand.19. Transliteration: Sometimes several transliterations of words or names originally in non-Roman alphabets are accepted in English (e.g., Chaikovsky, Tchaikovsky, and Tschaikowsky). Use any acceptable transliteration, but be consistent throughout your paper. (Exception: you cannot change the spelling of a name in a quotation or title; if the writer you are quoting or whose work you are citing uses a transliteration different from the one you are using in the paper, you must leave his or her spelling as is in the quotation or title.) Frequent errors to avoid20. Its vs. it's: "Its" is the possessive form of "it"; "it's" is a contraction meaning "it is." Look through your paper, turn every "it's" into "it is," and see if it makes sense. (Since you should not be using contractions in formal prose, never use "it's"!)21. None: "None" takes a singular verb (e.g., "None of these rules seems sensible to me").22. Principle vs. principal: If you want the adjective meaning "main," as in "principal theme," you want "-al"; if you are holding to your principles, you want "-le."23. That vs. which: These are frequently confused. "That" is used with restrictive clauses, which define or delimit the noun they modify: "the chicken heart that ate Chicago," as opposed to all other chicken hearts. "Which" is used with non-restrictive clauses, which merely add further information: "The Eiffel Tower, which is in Paris, was erected in 1889." Note that non-restrictive clauses are set off with commas, while restrictive clauses are not. Sample sentence: "This is a rule that you can almost always depend upon, which is not true of all rules." 
II. PresentationFormat24. Title and binding: Your paper need not have a title page. The title and your name should be given at the top center of the first page. Please also list the name of your section instructor. Please do not bind your paper in a plastic or cardboard cover or spiral binding. Simply print it out on 8.5"x11" white paper and staple or paper clip the pages together.25. Page numbering: Number all pages in one sequence, placing the number at the top center or upper right-hand corner (omitting page 1). The first page of text is page 1.26. First reference to a writer in the text: The first reference to a writer in the text should include his or her full name and some sort of reference to the writer's work.27. Footnotes vs. endnotes: For this class, you may use either footnotes or endnotes (but not both). If you use endnotes, place them immediately after the body of the text and before the bibliography. Start both the endnotes and the bibliography on a new page, and number the pages consecutively with the text.28. Placement of musical examples: For this class, you may place musical examples either within the body of the paper or on separate sheets at the end, unless your section instructor dictates a preference. If you do the latter, place them after the bibliography, and number the pages consecutively.Musical examples29. When to discuss music: Everything in your paper should be included for only one reason: because it helps you prove your case. Do not feel that you must analyze a piece of music just because you can; tell us only about the features that are important to your argument.30. When to present a musical example: There are only three reasons to present a musical example: (1) to discuss the passage in detail; (2) to show what cannot be described; or (3) as a favor to the reader, if the music is unpublished or hard to find. If you can describe the music well enough to make your point without showing it to us, you do not need to include an example.31. Captions: Every example must have a caption. See Turabian 26.3.2 for the style. In music, we typically use examples (Example 1) rather than figures (Figure 1), but the style is the same. Figures would be used for pictures, photographs, or other illustrations. You may use both Examples (for musical examples) and Figures (for pictures).32. Neatness and presentation: Musical examples must be neat and readable. If you copy them by hand or by computer, make sure they are pleasant-looking and accurate. If you photocopy or scan them from a score, make sure that the segment you include contains all necessary information (such as clefs, key signatures, time signatures, and so on, added by hand or cut-and-paste if necessary). Your examples must fit within the usual margins of the paper (i.e., at least one-inch margins on each side). Reducing the size of the music through photocopying or scanning may make your examples look better, but they must remain legible.Quotations33. When to use a quotation: There are only three reasons for using a quotation: (1) to present a document of some sort for discussion (as you would present a musical example); (2) to present a writer's argument for refutation; and (3) to repeat a particular turn of phrase that is especially felicitous (this should be used sparingly). In all other cases, it is preferable for you to present the ideas or information in your own words, making sure that you attribute the ideas to the original writer and that your paraphrase does not cross the boundary into plagiarism.34. Identify the source: The author of any quotation must be named in the text, and the source given in a note.35. Block quotation: Quotations of two or more lines of poetry or five or more lines of prose should be set off as a block quotation. Block quotations are indented from the main text and single-spaced and are not enclosed in quotation marks. See Turabian 25.2.2.36. Ellipses: Use ellipses to indicate that text has been omitted from the middle of a quotation. Do not use ellipses at the beginning or end of a quotation. Ellipses are typed with spaces on either side of each dot, like this . . . and never without spaces. Ellipses between sentences are typed like this. . . . The first dot functions as a period, the rest as the sign of an ellipsis. See Turabian 25.3.2, but use the "General Method" on pp. 355-56 (and not the "Textual Studies Method").Sources and citations37. When to cite a source in a footnote: All material derived from secondary sources, whether or not you quote it directly, must be credited. Cite the source of every quotation in a footnote. But also cite the source for any information you restate in your own words. You need not cite a source for well-known facts, such as a composer's birthdate, but should cite a source for any interpretation or opinion, even if it is repeated in several of your sources. 38. Full and short citations: The first time you cite a work in a footnote or endnote, give a full citation using footnote form. For all subsequent citations, use short form author-title notes