Now that the hostels closed for refurbishment I'm visiting young homeless people who have been moved into flats while the hostel's closed.
One of them has come up with a brilliant suggestion that my boss has decided to go for. He's into punk music (new modern shite not original stuff) and rap, along with the odd emo stuff. He's the type of person who gets really animated about music though he prefers certain genres and dismisses others. He's asked for me and a colleague Dave to have a weekly session with him and others on the history of music because so much of our past conversations have been about music.
Now my boss has ok'd this I'm faced with the prospect of having work time to research the history of music, and then present it with Dave to between two and eight young people.

To be honest, I'm well excited. Certain things spring to mind, such as punk, skapunk , reggae, ska etc all the way back to Jamaica, Slavery, Africa etc. Doesnt rap fit in there? And does this connect to hip hop, poetry?

We're not just talking music but the emotions, politics, history and culture behind it. I want to go back as far as possible.

Where did music begin? And how? Start there and work upwards, looking at certain strands and how they connect.

After reading a tremendous book called Song from the Forest by Louis Sarno about ten years ago I bought a CD on music by pygmies in central africa. I want to bring music like this into it, world music not just western stuff.

Any help, thoughts, websites, cds, dvds etc, witty or stupid comments would be helpful, however obvious it may seem. I know more than an average person about music and my colleague Dave knows more than me. Plenty of people on here know more than me, thats obvious, so please treat me as stupid and let me know anything you do.

How music connects; anything from the year dot to today, going through decades.
What was important about the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s etc and how did it move music forward, reflect society as it was?
What were the most important and influential bands of all decades and all genres?

Where does the term Jazz cigarettes come from?

Where does the idea of musicians selling their soul to the devil come from?

Take Marilyn Manson and go backwards in influence and where do you get to?
(Yeah I think he's shite as well but thats not the point. I'm talking about presenting to teenagers here and they dont think him and Linkin Park are shite)

Rap, Eminem, Dr Dre etc. Shock tactics with disgusting lyrics or reflecting society today with historical forebearers through musical history?

The possibilities are endless
I'll update any research I do over the coming weeks on here
Ta for any help at all as any thoughts would be helpful

But what about classical and opera? before you feck off and call me a toszer this music does involve pure raw emotion and not just a load of inspector Morse's

When you think about the political and social events over the years, I think music from a hundred year (and more) ago can reflect similar public attitudes to recent popular musical tastes. If you are talking music then 75 musicians giving it what for in time and tune and live, is a bit special.

What moved these musicians to create?

Good luck mate, no wonder you are excited

Excellent. I like classical music mate but I dont really know much about it.
Where does classical music start and who are the players, movers and shakers?
That must go back hundreds of years
Classical music is the history of hundreds of years of popular music

Agreed mate but there are more questions than answers for my limited knowledge! Some bits move me to tears, literally, others are just plain wank

A quiet room, after a few drinks and Barbers Adagio in strings just does it ,

Any way

its not too dissimilar to whats happening now if we reflect on social and political influences

Take Beethovens moonlight sonata, if he wasn't stoned when he plonked that fooker out...

Keep me informed how its going,

thank you
I'n going to bed because I've drank too much
feel free to inform me which bits move you to tears and which bits you consider to be wank. Dont worry if others dont agree, its all subjective.

You would do well to read up on Lee Perry, as he was one of the biggest driver in Jamaican music from the late 60's onwards. I reckon you can trace hip hop/rap etc back to him directly.

You seem to be concentrating on American music and how a stream of this evolved from afro/caribbean origins but I think things are a bit more complicated than that. American music also has influences from cajun, rockabilly, country, etc which I suppose emanated from the original white settlers who in turn came from Europe, predominantly England. Their influence may have been traditional Irish music. Classical music came from all over Europe and probably goes back to religious chants and used instruments such as lutes etc..

In very rough chronological order and classified very approximately

Troubador music (most often narration with songs interspersed) e.g., Adam de la Halle: Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion
Gregorian chants
Pilgrim music e.g., Cantigas de Santa Maria
Mediaeval profane music e.g., Greensleeves or this: http://www.newberry.org/consort/The%20N ... 20fear.mp3
Ancient Music, religious (e.g., Thomas Tallis) or Profane (e.g., John Dowland)
Baroque (Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Purcell, Handel, Bach, et al)
Classical (starting with Haydn/Mozart, extending to this day)
Romantic (Tchaikovsky, Schumann, et al)
Impressionistic (Satie, Debussy, Ravel)
Contemporary

No punk or ska in those days I'm afraid, but plenty of stuff akin to prog rock.

Get yerself down to your local library & order "People funny bwoy" its Lee Perrys (auto?)biography,a very good read,costs about 30p to order from Liverpool city library on loan.

Have you looked at the website http://www.musicplasma.com/

Type in a band and it gives you links to others and their connections.

Good way of getting from one band/artist to another.

I even found a link between Marilyn Manson and Britney Spears....

What about the link between him and Marc Almond

The admirable 'Rock Family Trees' would be a brilliant source of information and you could just lay the foundations and play the DVD's. Available from the net as well. It'd be a great project to start each student off on one path and the others on another. The research is all there and they could present it for the group. The British Ska story is fantastic.

what an admirable project,but it's just too big and you will finish up switching people off if you're not careful.
can't you personalise it a bit,ask them for their own personal favourite tracks or genre's of music and relate it back to that?
Kev's dead right about rock family trees as a source of reference

Dude - I think you need to narrow your field down. You could spend a lifetime on this - and many people do.

I'm a music graduate and so have spent probably almost 10 years doing some serious studies of music from about the 11th Century to present day. Even so, I could give you no more than a potted history - and even for a lot of that I would need my memory jogging by re-reading a lot of material. The topic is simply infinite.

Most of what I've studied would be termed as "Classical" music. From your initial post it sounds like your focus is most likely to be on 20th Century popular music and how the various types have evolved from each other and what the drivers were for this.

I think this website might get you started http://www.scaruffi.com/history/preface.html but I haven't read the material and we all know that the internet is full of cr@p. It might highlight particular areas to further narrow the focus.

Good luck mate

aphemia

Thanks for all the tips and help, much appreciated and I will follow all leads - and even get paid for it in work time

I havent given it loads of thought yet. Its brand new and I hope to be able to set some kind of structure in the next two weeks. We both realise this is a ridiculously huge arena to find ourselves in and we understand we cant give any type of music anything like the time its worth. However, what I do want to do is cover as many types as possible and work through in a linear fashion, even if this invariably means just touching on most of them.

Creating a sort of musical tree from the roots to the many many branches we see now.

Only that way can it really be a history of music (even if a very brief one). Then, if any of the young people are particularly interested in certain genres or eras we can help them discover this more after the course has ended.

This is important because we want to produce a package that can be used three or four times a year with different residents as they come and go.

I reckon (perhaps naively) that we can do the whole thing in eight sessions - lasting around two hours but perhaps longer than that should that be the natural flow.

Sessions one, three, five and seven would include the whole chronology of music in a linear way - thats looking at eight hours. Yes, it will be brief, simple statements, historical placings etc and a couple of tunes, but I dont think we have any other options if we are to do it this way.

Sessions two, four, six and eight can then look at particular issues we or the students might express an interest in. Off the top of my head this could include music they tried to ban, politics in music, perhaps making the chronological stuff more western orientated and having a session on world music (rather not do this), how music has actually been accessed (such as music as story telling, instruments and how they changed, gramaphone, vinyl, radio one and mtv domination, cd, internet, downloading and how the future might pan out etc)
Any other themes you can think of I would be grateful for

Included in this would be trips, not as part of the eight sessions

Bedes World have some feller who talks about medieval music, has all the instruments and plays them. He talks about how musicians were towards the top of the hierarchy because of their musical and story telling skills and how they were very close to kings and queens and therefore often used as spies, sometimes being caught and hung

Dave has already arranged for us to go to Pete Brewis' studio (he from Field Music and now School of Language) and Pete will show them all the instruments and let them have a dabble, maybe even make a cd for themselves.

He hopes to be able to get them into the Newcastle Academy as he knows people there too, and they can be taught how to work the whole gig event, lights, sound, security etc...maybe even scrounge some tickets.

My mates becoming a very successful DJ and he'd bring his decks in, show them how to mix and scratch or whatever the fuck its called.

Again suggestions welcome, though tyne and wear easier to access.

Plan to give them handouts after each session and would like to give them cd's of music covered - compilations made by us. Presume this is illegal and so my boss wouldnt be chuffed but might simply not tell her that bit.

God I'm worn out and I havent even started