Ethnomusicology

This course engages students in a quarter-long music ethnography project documenting the music and sound practices of sacred communities on Chicago’s South Side. Students will gain practical experience in ethnomusicological methods such as participant observation, interviewing, oral history, archival and digital research, fieldnote writing, sound recording, and collaborative representation. Working in teams, students will create micro-documentaries highlighting the sound practices of sacred communities. The course will culminate in a digital map showcasing the sound practices of South Side communities. This map will serve as a visual representation and digital archive of local musicking and cultural diversity, in support of local music communities.

In “Sounding Israel/Palestine” we shall look at specific moments when the musics and sound worlds of Israel/Palestine converged, responding to and shaping historical change and conflict. Bi-weekly sessions will take specific historical moments as ways of exploring how music was critical to the processes of change, identity, and accommodation. We begin with moments in Antiquity, among them the moments in which the temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (e.g., 70 CE). and the Miʿrāj, when the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven (ca. 621 CE). Moments marking the patterns of settlement (Yishuv) and political transformation and unrest will mark the chronology of modernity and modernism (e.g., 1917, 1933, 1938). The moments of Israeli statehood and Palestinian Nakba will be of growing significance as the course moves toward the twenty-first century (e.g., 1948, 1967, and 1987). The sounds of the present moment (2023 and beyond)—of the war in Gaza, of the struggle for survival in Palestine, of the mass mediation of dissonant political voices, of breakthrough genres of popular music—will become the texts and contexts for the closing weeks of the course.

The course explores the role of music during periods of crisis in global contexts. We will study how communities and societies use music and sound to express, make sense of, and even generate regimes of fear, torture, and loss. At a time when the human and more-than-human spheres coalesce, new technologies redefine human experience, and political and natural catastrophes shape lived reality, sound becomes a powerful way of practising resilience. The course engages interdisciplinary methods to understand issues of musical activism, music therapy, and music as a powerful means to come to terms with conflict, war, and personal trauma. Be it the Second World War where music served to further Nazi propaganda, anthropogenic sound that results in stress, habitat alteration for land and marine animals, dealing with the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, the "music-before-mosque" riots in South Asia where processions near religious spaces fuelled communal violence, or stories in indigenous cultures that music could mitigate natural calamity, music is a rich site of understanding how communities deal with moments of crisis. Disciplines such as psychoanalysis, cultural studies, sound studies, media studies, and environmental humanities will be explored with a focus on close analysis of music in global contexts. Assignments feature creative projects (podcasts, annotated playlists, video essays, creative compositions, etc.) and academic papers. No prior musical background required.

Audre Lorde famously suggested that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And yet for as long as human societies have been organized by structural oppression, disenfranchised peoples have managed to exercise subversive forms of agency by reinterpreting the societal structures and cultural resources they have inherited from their oppressors, retooling these structures to serve their own marginalized communities’ needs. This syllabus foregrounds the works of LGBTQ and BIPOC scholars and artists to discuss the various ways agency is exercised from below in the seemingly intractable context of heteropatriarchal white supremacist settler colonialism. As many of these writers and performers demonstrate, such agency often involves working directly with “the master’s tools” while strategically subverting these same resources in service of minoritarian goals. Throughout the quarter, we will use music and performance as our lens to interrogate these subversive forms of resistance and the performative power of artistic expression.

This course introduces autoethnography as a practice of linking personal narrative to meaningful cultural critique. Students will experiment with performance, writing, and multimedia practices to test how storytelling and embodied practice can function as research tools. Throughout the course, we will consider how creative methods can inform research design, how to evaluate the quality and utility of autoethnographic research, and what role sharing and community play in the effectiveness of qualitative research.

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.

The course explores some of the music traditions that hail from South Asia—a region defined by the countries of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Maldives, and their diasporas. The course will study music and some of its inextricably linked forms of dance and theatre through the lens of ethnomusicology, where music is considered in its social and cultural contexts. Students will develop tools to listen, analyze, watch, and participate in South Asian forms of music-making, using case-study based inquiries as guides along the way.

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 we shall look at specific moments when the musics of Israel/Palestine converged, responding to and shaping historical change and conflict. Weekly sessions will take specific moments as ways of exploring how music was critical to the processes of change, identity, and accommodation. We begin with moments in Antiquity, among them the moments in which the temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (e.g., 70 ce). and the Miʿrāj, when the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven (ca. 621 ce). Moments marking the patterns of settlement (Yishuv) and political transformation and unrest will mark the chronology of modernity and modernism (e.g., 1917, 1933, 1938). The moments of Israeli statehood and Palestinian Nakba will be of growing significance as the course moves toward the twenty-first century (e.g., 1948, 1967, and 1987).

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.