I remember being assigned my first annotated bibliography in Music History III with Dr. Haefeli and being terribly confused and stressed about the whole thing. Being a transfer student from a community college, I had never done it before. I had also transferred my Music History I credit and thus, did not take the class at IC: when one learns how to write the annotated bibliography. Perhaps needless to say, the assignment was sent back to me to review further and resubmit.
I think I tend towards making my focus too broad, as there are so many interesting things to talk about in so many subjects. Indeed, "What is my subject?" has always been the hardest question to answer because I never know where to start. I especially like the section in the Barzun article when the question "What does Roman Empire mean?" is posed. There are seemingly infinite ways to answer this question, so many of which are so different but all correct. The answer simply has to be complete. I say simply, but I know from past experience it isn't so simple to make something complete. While I've been terribly frustrated at cutting and reworking entire pages of material, I knew that, as the article states, it is necessary to omit information to keep the subject together and standing on its own. I recall an example from my history class at community college where I started a paper on the 20th century American music pioneers and as my paper went on it developed into a paper entirely dedicated to the music of Henry Cowell.
The next two articles, while not as thought-provoking as the first, were indeed very helpful. I find the Knott article's point on the problem very valuable. To know what problem is being solved, what question is being answered is a massive obstacle for me and is a very helpful jumping-off point. I was encouraged to see in the Toledo article that it is important to include a writer's qualifications and biases. I hadn't really considered those in the past and they are tremendously important in evaluating a source. It is also encouraging to see the differences in the two articles, allowing some freedom in something I considered so cut and dry.
Going back to "The Prime Difficulty," I'm not at all sure of what my topic will be. I've never done any research on Takemitsu's guitar music and he is my favorite composer. I've also never taken much of an interest in the music of the early masters of the guitar e.g. Giuliani, Carulli, Sor which would certainly be good things to know as a graduate student studying guitar performance. However, I also love topics concerning cultural identity in music and folk music. These are actually more ideas than I thought I had, so that's a bit reassuring to my indecisive brain.
