Music and the Spatial Imagination

This course explores how geography shapes culture and how culture shapes geography within the context of traditional and popular musical practices from around the world. Starting from the premise that social processes, cultural practices, and different scales of geographic space are mutually interdependent, two foundational questions arise. First, how do diverse geographical knowledges mediate the interpretation and practice of different musical genres? Second, how does musical performance in the context of the political economy of music and musicians’ artistic agendas promote particular and competing spatial imaginaries? Students will interrogate terms from human geography such as space, place, local, global, and scale; assess debates surrounding these terms; and critically evaluate the power of maps to shape geographic knowledge. Through assembling this critical geographic lens, students will analyze the ways in which musical practices across different cultures converge with social processes and discourses including race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, diasporas, and technology and how a spatial imagination shapes this nexus.