Arab Music Cultures

Catalog description

Arab music culture, understood as an assemblage of ideas, practices, instruments, and traditions of sounding and listening, flourishes across the Arab world and in other places where Arabs have settled. This course provides a thorough overview of Arab music culture in the contemporary world, by investigating a number of its iterations within and beyond the Middle East and North Africa. Course materials, including sound recordings and films as well as written works, utilize music as a prism to view other aspects of society, such as religion, nationalism, and diaspora. By engaging critically with these materials, students cultivate ways of speaking and writing about music and culture in Arab and other contexts. The course thus prepares students for further work in ethnomusicology, the study of music as culture.