Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 April 24

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April 24

Is a first professional degree in Juris Doctor equivalent to an advanced bachelor’s degree?

Juris Doctor is a first professional degree, which explains why it’s not similar to Master’s degree in other disciplines even when they both require the completion of undergraduate coursework. Is first professional degree equivalent to some kind of an advancedItalic text bachelor’s degree? And if yes, does it mean that your undergraduate degree is merely means to get to law school?Rja2015 (talk) 13:33, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

In the United States, a JD is probably more like a Master's or perhaps Master's Plus degree (that is, between Master's and Doctorate). It is not strictly a terminal degree, but it is also not an undergraduate degree. Legal education in the United States and Law school in the United States covers this a bit. Remember that there's no rule or law requiring a one-to-one correspondence between the certifications in various academic disciplines, and the "Bachelor's-Master's-Doctorate" progression in most academic disciplines does not align well with the Legal and Medical professions, each of which have their own training systems with their own terminology and their own hierarchy. Strictly speaking, there is no undergraduate law degree in the U.S., you get a bachelor's degree in a field related to your desired legal track (i.e. science for patent law, criminal justice for criminal law, accounting for tax law, etc.) and then enter law school. In law school, there would be two tracks: one for professional lawyers, and one for those who wish to study the law academically. For professional lawyers, the J.D. is it. You get your J.D. as the certification that you completed law school. There are no other steps. If you are entering academia, you would get Master of Laws degree or a Doctor of Juridical Science, which are academic and not professional certification. Professional lawyers who wish to become law school professors or legal academics may follow their J.D. (for Academia sake, it would be considered the equivalent of a Master of Laws) and get their Doctor of Juridical Science. --Jayron32 14:25, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Some universities offer undergraduate law degrees – Bob Jones University, to my knowledge. These however are not recognised by the AB as adequate for attempting the bar exam. The Bologna Process (Bachelor, Masters, PhD) is commonest most countries in most subjects. The UK uses it for law: Bachelor's in Law, LPC (equivalent to a masters) and then a two year apprenticeship. The US system is adopted to a lesser extent elsewhere, like Canada & Australia. It has its advantages but it doesn't quite slot into the Bologna Process. Whilst it has its advantages, it's much more expensive and leaves a Bachelor's degree rather underused. 92.8.190.5 (talk) 12:36, 25 April 2015 (UTC) Further: yes, you could say a JD is nearly equivalent to an advanced Bachelor's Degree. In the UK, some law schools offer a two year, graduate Bachelor's degree for students who have already a bachelor's degree in a different subject. Queen's University, Belfast is a good example. Most students do the Bologna Process - three year Bachelor's, and then a Master's equivalent course. They are then an apprentice lawyer. However, if a student already has a Bachelor's degree in a different subject they can enroll in the Master of Legal Science - the same as a Bachelor's degree in law, except it only takes two years instead of three. It only covers substantive law, not the 'practising' bit that would be covered on the LPC. Queen's University also do a Juris Doctor: a degree in Northern Ireland law, but in the Amercian format. That's like an MSL, then a LPC in one.92.8.190.5 (talk) 14:24, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

transcribing a musical score from hearing only

I have limited musical training but a lifelong love of classical music. Recently I started listening in my car to music on a USB. The piece which is always played first when the USB initializes is Adagio in G minor. I just love it. It's seven minutes long, but most of the time I let it play, even though with some fiddling I could run down the song list and interrupt it.

After a while I started to understand the piece more deeply than other music Ive heard a lot of times. I've very much enjoyed coming to understand the structure, picking out the parts (even the viola) and anticipating the most dramatic parts (like the sudden loud da DUM in the middle).

Though this is a lovely piece of music, it also seems to be relatively simple as far as those things go, in part because it is played by a small ensemble. The question is: What level of skill would a musician have to have to transcribe the score from hearing it only (any number of times)? Would those be skills an undergraduate student might have? (I would think not.) What about an experienced musicologist? Another composer? --Halcatalyst (talk) 17:41, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

It's potentially something innate; see the bits about Mozart in Miserere (Allegri). Don't know how much training you'd need if this weren't innate. Nyttend (talk) 19:07, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Some people are no doubt better at it than others, but transcribing music by ear is a fairly basic part of a musician's training, starting with the aural tests in practical music examinations, which in the early grades ask candidates to sing back a short phrase, leading on to recognition of cadences and other chord sequences, and picking out the lower or iner notes of a chord, or the lower part of a phrase in two voices. Other exams may involve transcribing a phrase after a fixed number of hearings. So transcribing a piece such as the Adagio (often wrongly described as being by Albinoni) is perhaps not as much of a feat as it might seem to a layman: it might be hard to reproduce the exact notes in all parts (cheat sheet here), but a musician knows the "grammar" of the music, and so can pick out things like "that's the first half of a minor scale", or "that's a perfect cadence", and make plausible guesses about what's being played; this can be refined by multiple hearings. I would have thought that an undergraduate of a reasonably academic music course would be able to produce a reasonable approximation. Of course the difficulty depends on the complexity of the music: the Adagio is lightly scored, slow-moving and fairly predictable, which helps a lot. Consider this transcription of Art Tatum's playing: at first sight it seems almost miraculous that someone could work out all the notes that are being played, but to some familiar with the idiom it's more a case of picking out patterns rather than just a series of individual notes. As a vague analogy, consider the difference between copying a text in English as opposed to one in a foreign language that you hardly know: both use the same basic ingredients - the alphabet - but for the English text you see past letters and take in whole words and phrases, and so do the job much more easily. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 20:12, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

It's also a skill musicians pick up passively: that is, without being trained specifically to do it. At Grade 4 violin I could name notes like colours. Play a G, I knew it was a G. When I played the wrong scale in an exam, the examiner repeated which scale he originally requested I play and named the incorrect scale I had actually played. Mind you, a musician's training is critical to doing it properly so that for example you can recognise modulations (key changes) and ignore minor details such as trills.92.8.190.5 (talk) 12:25, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

• Thank you all. The answer seems to be that regardless of formal education it certainly takes a lot of experience in music and or genius. Thanks especially for the link to the Tatum performance both that an the transcription are amazing. --Halcatalyst (talk) 18:27, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

New York and Appleton's

I've just created James McFarlane Mathews, but I need help. (1) How do we normally cite Appleton's when it's just part of a work? Here, I just copied the first and third paragraphs from Appleton's, with changes to make it sound like a Wikipedia article, while the second paragraph is adapted from Scouller's Manual, but written in my own words. In my experience, most stuff taken from these old PD encyclopedias is copied wholesale, without substantial additions from other sources, and simply tagged with {{Appletons}}, but that won't work here because I'm using inline citations. (2) Mathews was involved with New York's "Christian union council" and was the chancellor of the University of New York from 1831 to 1839. Do we have articles on either of these? City University of New York wasn't founded until after Mathews was out of office, and I don't know whether the Christian union council were some informal group or a big-name thing that is or was prominent. Nyttend (talk) 19:04, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

The "University of New York" can be linked to New York University (NYU), which was known as the University of the City of New York for its first several decades. McFarlane was its first chancellor. It would make sense to add his name and link to his bio from the history section of the article on NYU. See the footnote beneath letter 274 in this source. There is also a reference in this book, authored by Mathews himself. Marco polo (talk) 20:24, 24 April 2015 (UTC)