Music of World Cultures

Catalog description

Three lecture. This course is intended as a broad survey of music and its place in human cultures around the world, with a focus on non-Western Cultures. We will consider traditional, popular, and classical music from a number of regions in an ethnomusicological perspective, highlighting similarities and differences in music’s relation to other domains of social life, such as cosmology, art, language, economics, and politics, cross-culturally. Ultimately, the purpose of this class is to better understand music and the many ways it can be meaningful as a part of the world’s cultural diversity. Students will be able to: identify music and musical attributes and values from around the world; develop an understanding of a variety of music-cultures from around the globe and how those music-cultures fit into global society; situate the music from each of the regions studied within a specific social, cultural, and historical context; apply the various cultural theories (anthropological, sociological, and ethnomusicological) discussed in the course to their own musical experiences; discuss the ways in which music and identity are linked within social and cultural formations, particularly along axes of race, gender, class, and ethnicity; evaluate the validity of established canons and categories conventionally employed to study music and their usefulness for cross-cultural analysis. General Education: Arts and Humanities, Institutions in the Americas