History of Rock Music

Catalog description

In this course students will focus on the history and literature of American popular music from circa 1920 to the present. Students will develop strategies for listening to the sounds of popular music idioms and identify instruments, formal structures, important musicians and personnel, and stylistic differences between genres of American popular music. Students will compare trends in popular music to those of classical music and jazz. Students will analyze aesthetics, lyrics, and historical contexts of exemplars of American popular music. Students will compose songs in American popular music idioms.