Music of the Spirit

Catalog description

This guided listening course is a musical exploration of spirituality, a musicological and ethnomusicological survey organized around comparative religions. While the majority of repertoire will be from the Western Classical tradition, musics of a variety of cultures will be included. The music will be organized by particular religious traditions and by universal themes, such as community, death/afterlife, birth/new birth, martyrs/heroes, transcendence /immanence, meditation/contemplation/trance, etc. Most course materials, including streaming audio, are online, with one meeting per week in the classroom. Will include participatory introductions to numerous forms of chant. Requires oral and written reports.