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.

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.

The seminar explores musical embodiments of a scriptural book, which has stood in the midst of rich theological and philosophical debates, within and between two religious universes. The seminar’s title paraphrases a major moment in the book: when God reveals himself to Job the sufferer, from the whirlwind. That was a powerful, boisterous moment. Combined with other audible articulations strewn throughout the book, it has opened itself up to a plethora of sonic imaginaries, suggested and elaborated in the course of its long durée. Inspired by the book, the seminar aims to probe the aesthetic theology of sound, noise and silence. We will study its manifestations in poetic, oratorical, pictorial, choreographic and cinematic embodiments of the book, from early times to the present day. We will focus mainly on modern expressions, which, while referring to ancient and medieval legacies, respond to contemporary plights and aporias. The figure of the suffering Job, at times the patron saint of music, will shed new light on the cultural connections among music, heresy, compassion, and consolation. Methodological considerations will be highlighted in each class, crossing disciplinary borders, periods and media.

We will focus on the status and analysis of music documentaries concerning, for example, musicians/groups, styles, instruments, historical periods, recording labels. One of our primary aims will be to determine how such films stand both in relation to other films (including so-called biopics) and in relation to other representations of musicians in images and words. Relatedly, we will be concerned with the technical and narrative strategies of directors, editors and script writers: e.g., the relative merits of location recording vis-à-vis studio environments; the use of confessional and “talking head” interviews; approaches for including performance footage; editing strategies; choice of film stock; and the like. In the end, our brief will be to understand how such filmic portraits reinforce and complicate notions of authorship/creativity, labor, economy, identity and value.

The topic of this seminar varies per faculty member. This proseminar is designed to equip graduate students with methodological and epistemological tools for doing ethnographic fieldwork in expressive cultural contexts.

In this course, we gather sound and music to afford new ways to understand the history and culture of a geographical region. Instead of an area study, we concern ourselves with listening to sound worlds, local and global. We balance the reading of primary and secondary sources—the writings of travelers and practitioners alongside theoretical treatises and modern ethnomusicological scholarship—with the different listening practices, especially collections and assemblages of recorded sound and film. Each student will develop her or his own means of entering different sound worlds. Accordingly, students with varying degrees of musical background will be able to navigate the Indian Ocean World in ways suitable to their own backgrounds and interests. Students from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Divinity are welcome. Both College students and graduate students may register for the course, with the only distinction being in the scope of the final project.

This course explores the music and sound of popular Hindi cinema from aesthetic, social, cultural, economic, historical, and political perspectives. Students will be introduced to the musical conventions and practices of the genre, and to changes in Bollywood musical style over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will watch select films with keen attention to music’s imbrication with cinematic visuality, narrative, technology, and dance, and with consideration of issues like emplacement, gender, caste, religion, capitalism, nationalism, and transnationalism. Bollywood is a cosmopolitan music, drawing from and contributing to a range of regional and international music practices; we also venture into some of those streams.

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.