Answering these questions enables you to relate material from the text to your own personal experiences.
Describe a religious ritual or event that you have experienced firsthand. How did the physical setting (church, mosque, funeral home) affect your emotional response? In your answer, consider visual imagery, music, recitation of texts, and so on.
Attend the live performance of an opera or musical; how did each aspect of the performance (drama, music, set, costumes, dance, etc.) contribute to the total effect?
Find a work of art, music, literature, or film from your own time and place that, in your view, fits the stylistic term “baroque.” Explain how and why the term is appropriate.
Think of the Baroque emphasis on spectacle. How does watching a music video differ from listening to a song on a CD or mp3-player?
One of the major conflicts between 16th- and 17th-century Protestants and Catholics was over the style of worship services—whereas Catholics focused on spectacle and, we might say, spiritual and psychological transport to another place, Protestants sought to involve worshippers more directly, through congregational participation and the restriction of ritual. Regardless of your beliefs, which style do you consider most effective and why?
