Ethnomusicology

Each May since 1956 popular musicians and fans from Europe gather in a European metropolis to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), a competitive spectacle in which musicians from one nation compete against one another. Organized, funded, and broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union, the largest conglomerate of national radio and television networks in the world, the ESC is extensively participatory, creating its own communities of fans, musicians, musical producers, and ordinary citizens, who join together at all levels of society to interact with the politics and historical narratives of Europe. From the moment of heightened Cold War conflict at the birth of ESC to the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the present, ESC has generated public discourse that not only reflects European and global politics, but provides a conduit for local and national citizenries to respond and shape such public discourse about gender and sexuality. The weekly work for the course draws students from across the College into the counterpoint of history and politics with aesthetics and popular culture. Each week will be divided into two parts, the first dedicated to reading and discussion of texts about European history and politics from World War II to the present, the second to interaction with music. Students will experience the ESC through close readings of individual songs and growing familiarity with individual nations with a participatory final project.

Focusing on recent processes of people transitioning and crossing over, in this course, we will study migrating and mobile musics to understand and reconsider music's interrelations with location, space, and transcultural movement. Considering music as a mobile and flexible medium highlights how musical practice shapes post-mobility settings, and inversely, how power structures and cultural processes that govern such environments shape music-making and subjectivities within it. Incited by the recent displacement of individuals and collectives from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya to Europe (specifically to the German-speaking lands), we initially study musical representations such as adapted operas, mixed-ensemble performances, and plays on the streets and the web that emerged because of people's movements. The analysis of these fusions, sound experiments, ensembles and assemblies, co-performances, collaborations, and moments of cultural resistance highlights how music originating in the Arab World interacts with that happening in European sonic locales. Drawing from translational theories, migration studies, and performance studies for the analysis of musical expressions, we then interact with musicians in Chicagoan contexts to study their music-making; music which-as a result of discontinuity, transitional processes, and new contacts-is adapted, altered, and re-contextualized while acquiring new functions and meanings.

This course provides an introduction to ethnomusicology and related disciplines with an emphasis on the methods and contemporary practice of social and cultural analysis. The course reviews a broad selection of writing on non-Western, popular, vernacular, and "world-music" genres from a historical and theoretical perspective, clarifying key analytical terms (i.e., "culture," "subculture," "style," "ritual," "globalization") and methods (i.e., ethnography, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism). In the last part of the course, students learn and develop component skills of fieldwork documentation and ethnographic writing.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This course has two goals: (1) to introduce graduate students to the broad theoretical underpinnings of ethnomusicology as a research discipline and (2) to help students gain facility with the resources and perspectives that might enable them to teach a quarter- or semester-long undergraduate course on the musics of the world. As such, the readings and assignments focus on canonic materials and areas for ethnomusicological study including, but not limited to, major monographs, recorded collections and reference works examining the musics of East, Southeast and South Asia; Africa; Europe; and the Americas. Each student will be responsible for presenting brief overviews of key texts and recordings as well as devising two syllabi and a sample lecture outline by the end of the quarter.

In this proseminar in analysis we examine the concepts and structures of mode that stretch from South Asia across the Middle East to the Mediterranean. We concentrate our comparative study on Arabic maq_m, Turkish makam, Persian radif, North Indian/Hindustani r_ga, and South Indian/Karnatak r_gam. Historically, processes and patterns of exchange between classical, popular, and folk musics in these regions have shaped repertories, ideas of melody and form, vocal practice and instrumental accompaniment, improvisation and composition, bearing witness to similarities and cross-influences, no less than to distinctive local and regional music cultures. To know and understand the music cultures of the Middle East and South Asia, as well as Muslim regions of Central and East Asia, it is indispensable also to understand the practices of improvisation and composition we analyze in this proseminar.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.