Ethnomusicology

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.

Our journey will involve engaging with a rich array of materials—books, articles, poetry, films, essays, and musical recordings—from prominent scholars and artists such as Hilary Beckles, Yarimar Bonilla, Aimé Césaire, Aisha Khan, Frantz Fanon, Shalini Puri, Édouard Glissant, Raquel Rivera, C.L.R. James, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Aaron Kamugisha, Sylvia Wynter, Walter Mignolo, Carolyn Cooper, Fernando Ortiz, Michel Rolph Trouillot, Michaeline Crichlow, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Derek Walcott, and Nadia Ellis. 
 
This course is designed for anyone interested in theory that confronts the urgent challenges of our time. It also offers a model for how regional thought, deeply rooted in specific contexts, can expand to inform and transform global concepts. Throughout the course, we will uncover how Caribbean intellectual traditions continue to shape and influence contemporary theoretical debates, providing fresh perspectives on the world we live in.

This course’s goal is to introduce graduate students to the history, development and theoretical underpinnings of ethnomusicology as a research discipline. In our readings, therefore, we will focus our attention on key figures and institutions, especially from the late 19th century forward; on major issues and debates in and beyond ethnomusicology; on the relationships between ethnomusicology and other research disciplines; and on emergent emphases and concerns in ethnomusicological work. 

This course has as its focus the varied social agents, discourses, processes and institutions that contribute to current and historical understandings of rock. Issues of musical style, questions of historiography, the technologies and techniques of audio recording, the structures of the recording industry, the status of so-called subcultures and mainstreams, and the politics of gender, race and sexuality are among the items which our readings, class discussions and assignments will explore. As such, the inculcation of an “appreciation” of rock, the transmission of a canon and the validation of individual musical tastes are projects that are antithetical to our inquiry. Students will also be encouraged, through select readings and listening assignments, to contextualize rock within a broad field of twentieth- and twenty-first century music-making and attendant social, political and economic processes.

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’s goal is to introduce graduate students to the history, development and theoretical underpinnings of ethnomusicology as a research discipline. In our readings, therefore, we will focus our attention on key figures and institutions, especially from the late 19th century forward; on major issues and debates in and beyond ethnomusicology; on the relationships between ethnomusicology and other research disciplines; and on emergent emphases and concerns in ethnomusicological work.

This course covers the sonic and structural characteristics, as well as the social, political, environmental, and historical contexts of Caribbean popular and folk music. These initial inquiries will give way to the investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that are particularly important to an understanding of the Caribbean and its people. Specifically, we will think through the ways in which creolization, hybridity, colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism, and migration inform and shape music performance and consumption in the region and throughout its diaspora. In this course, participants will listen to many different styles and repertoires of music, ranging from calypso to kumina, from reggaeton to bachata, and from dancehall to zouk. We will also examine how the Caribbean and its music are imagined and engaged with globally by focusing attention on how and why music from that region has traveled and been adopted and adapted by numerous ethnic and religious “others.”

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 survey charts the history and development of jazz from its earliest origins to the present. Representative recordings in various styles are selected for intensive analysis and connected to other musics, currents in American and world cultures, and the contexts and processes of performance. The Chicago Jazz Archive in Regenstein Library provides primary source materials.