Postmusic

Catalog description

This seminar will survey and assess new developments in music studies that open up fundamental theoretical questions about its basic object of analysis: music. These problems for thought include the transition from works to practices, the reformulation of audiences, the end of European claims of aesthetic universality, the reappraisal of human-centered accounts of music, the historical emergence of the categories of sound and sound art, and the destabilization of what counts as knowledge about music and how musical expertise has been institutionalized. As the social and historical conditions that once gave rise to the scholarly study of music are displaced by a new global formation, music studies appear uncertain about what it's object might be, hence the title of this seminar.