Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to our Musical Pathways project! This project is the result of the MUH210H: Musical Pathways class at Converse University. The H stands for Honors--the course is for students in the Nisbet Honors program at Converse. There are nine students and one faculty member; the students range from first- to third-year students and come from a variety of backgrounds and majors. 

Our class has taken an interdisciplinary approach to the study of musical instruments. In our class we have been following the Arabic oud, as it travelled to Spain and begat both the vihuela and the lute, and then the guitar, and then we followed the vihuela and guitar across the Atlantic as they developed into a variety of instruments, including the acoustic guitar, the electric guitar, the guitarron, the charango, the ukulele, and the pedal steel guitar. Along the way we studied not only the instruments themselves but the music they produced and the cultural movements behind the instruments' migration and evolution. It's been a long, strange trip 😎. 

For our class projects, we were organized into pairs of students, and each pair was given a different instrument. The pairs researched the evolution of their assigned instrument, tracing the development around the world. Then, as a class, we chose to present those instrumental journeys in the form of Map Essays. You'll find those Map Essays embedded in each pair's page. Click on the instrument page, and then pop out the Map that's embedded there. You can navigate around the Maps the same way you'd navigate around your GPS--click on the points and the lines and learn about the evolution of the instrument! Be sure to click on the pictures and videos embedded in the map info--you want to be able to actually hear and see the instruments we've been tracking.

A small caveat: because our time and prior knowledge is limited, none of the Maps are exhaustive. We had to choose which part of our instrument's evolution to focus on. Perhaps future classes will build on this work?

Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Jeff Howard, the Director of the Converse Writing Center, for giving us the idea of Map Essays and helping us begin our journey. We would also like to thank Drs. Will Case and Laura Brown, Co-Directors of the Nisbet Honors Program, for all the opportunities they give us.