SEMINAR: CULTURAL STUDY OF MUSIC

AFRICAN 405

Examines various mediated cultural forms such as broadcasting, news, performance, music, film, or social media created and used across regions and countries in Africa, addressing issues such as cultural identity, nation building, constraints on expression, access, and reception, and the interaction of global and African cultural forms.

AFRICAN 409

Introduces the phenomenon of "musical blackness" as a US-based, transnational cultural form and practice. Explores (topics will vary) how US-based, racially specified black musical forms, together with global forms also identified as "black," were constituted as part of the legacies of European colonial encounter and US imperial expansion; the categories of "traditional" music and popular style took shape and have been experienced as something part and parcel of this historical process. Gives close consideration to genre, style, and performance practice, in order to understand the many ways in which musical sound and social/political ideas are inextricably linked.

MUSIC 419

Explores a variety of genres within their social and historical contexts including folk songs and ballads, the Native American Pow Wow, New England psalmody, popular song repertories, musical theater and opera, concert music, blues and jazz.

FOLKLORE/MUSIC 915

Topics in ethnomusicology within a cross-cultural framework; melodic typology, scale and tuning systems, mode, rhythm, ornamentation, improvisation techniques, oral and written traditions of composition, notation systems, and function of music society.

MUSIC 911

Topics in musicology, dealing primarily with an important aspect or genre or music or segment of a stylistic period.