Short description: This seminar series in transcultural musicology introduces students to the diversity of musical expressions of the world’s peoples in all their variety, uniqueness, and expressivity, as well the historical and contemporary settings in which they appear. The course advances direct experience of music in diverse cultural contexts and settings through classroom workshops and exercises.
The relationships between music, the society in which it is performed, and individual identities are surveyed and examined in this transcultural World Music course. Starting from the belief that music is defined by the human experiences it characterizes, the focus of this course is to present students with a broad overview of the world’s music, challenging existing boundaries between genres and physical locations. As the accessibility to the music of other cultures is now a much simpler affair than it was in the past, new questions emerge as to how much is actually known about the backgrounds, attitudes, and personal histories of the genres and the performers and vocalists that create these new musical topoi. These questions are not only confined to whether we understand the enchantment, longing, and spirituality of the World Music which now surrounds us, but also to what we can learn to enhance our comprehension, appreciation, and performance of the various transcultural musical environments that are currently available to us.
Students are called to observe how musical practices express, shape, and allow individuals and groups to collectively construct and negotiate identity, ethnicity, genre, spirituality, and class. By assessing both modern and historical musical practices in their traditional and contemporary settings, the challenge is to examine how changes in (the definition of) music as a social practice have mapped out reactions to globalization, immigration, and modernity.
Student seminars are enriched with videos and sound recordings, and involve discussions of set readings as well as an aural analysis of selected musical examples. World music genres under study will include examples from The Global Jukebox Project (Scotland, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Northwest Pakistan, Germany, and Vietnam, among others).
At the end of the seminar series, students are expected to:
· trace distinct- and blended-world music genres within their respected historical, sociocultural, and global contexts.
· Identify and appreciate diverse world music genres on the basis of their aesthetic differences.
· Procure an analysis of world music songs and music using a simplified version of Alan Lomax’s cantometrics, taking into consideration socio-cultural performative dimensions
Assessment: Hausarbeit (50%), & in-class journal to record responses to set listenings and analyses (50%).
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Dr. George Athanasopoulos