Music, Modes of Listening, and Nostalgia

Catalog description

This course explores the intersection between two seemingly unrelated topics: 1) the ways in which market pressures and shifting technological developments have influenced dominant modes of listening to music, and 2) the emergence of a culture of nostalgia and obsessive reflexivity in both popular and art-music domains. Primary readings will include Simon Reynolds’s Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past and Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989.