How to write an essay on Music
Music—along with movies—is one those truly golden topics that is really a pleasure to write. The number of essays you can do on music or particular band or movement is virtually endless. To get the easier ones out of the way, you can do a rock music essay, a country music essay, a pop music essay, a classical music essay, and so on. Again these are some of the simpler ones to take on and they’re pretty vague. Chances are that your professor will probably be looking for something more complex and insightful.
Starting Topics for Your Essay
Since music is a fairly vast topic, we’ve narrowed it down to a few topics. You can always research music and draw out some topics and subtopics to explore or as a few music essay questions to get the ball rolling as far as what you actually want to research. Either way you’ll need to research before you get into the writing portion of the essay process.
Once you’re done researching ask questions and make observations to begin structuring your thesis statement. Your thesis statement is essentially the nucleus of your entire essay and is what all the research and facts you dig up will support. The observation itself doesn’t need to be particularly deep or world changing; it’s all in how you structure it.
Something such as “Rock music started in the 1950s” is merely a statement based on fact. A thesis statement would be something along the lines of “Because rock music was so drastically different from the music of prior generations, it received a bad reputation as both devil music and youth corrupting music in the 1950s and 1960s.” While a pretty pedestrian statement, it could still serve as the nucleus for your music essay.
- Essay Topics
- History of rock music;
- The MTV Generation;
- History of country music;
- The relationship between blues and rock;
- Music of the 80s;
- Progressive rock;
- Musical theory;
- Therapeutic qualities of music;
- New Wave;
- History of Heavy Metal;
- The roots of Hip Hop;
- Censorship in Music and the Benefit of the Warning Label.
Diving Into the Drafting and Editing Stages
Taking on the actual heavy lifting part of your essay is no small feat, but it can run a bit smoothly depending on how you decide to approach it and how early you decided to start on your music essay. You could take the traditional route and write your essay from introduction to closing and then edit it, taking out what makes your essay cumbersome and reediting what works.
Then again you could write the introduction and the closing first. These two are usually the cause for an essay taking longer than it should while the middle portion—the body of the essay—breezes along without a care. Once you have these two completed, you could then take on the body—which are just facts and references that support your thesis statement in the introduction anyway.
So you have two approaches to your essay. Once that is done, edit it, add the bibliography, format it, and turn it in. The entire process is actually much easier than it seems.