A study of the theoretical and practical aspects of ethnomusicological field work, using the New York area as a setting for exercises and individual projects. This is the second in a sequence of two courses. Students are expected to have developed an ethnographic research project based in the New York area, and to have begun field research on the project. The focus of Field Methods II is on the analysis and interpretation of qualitative research data, and the planning and writing of a musical ethnography. The seminar is run as a writing workshop, and there will be weekly assignments that should culminate in the completion of a draft MA thesis or article-length study.

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“…To refer to the culture of the Caribbean geographically–other than to call it a meta-archipelago–is a debilitating and scarcely productive project…” (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 24). Recent trends in ethnomusicology have included a greater emphasis on the study of translocal cultural formations, social processes, and musical idioms, as well as on the processes of globalization and intercultural exchange, and often less emphasis on bounded geographical specificity. This graduate seminar will explore the implications of this shift by examining how various scholars have approached “the Caribbean” through locally situated ethnographic research and how they have engaged with locality, transnationalism, and the conditions of coloniality and post-coloniality? We will consider what value “area studies” still holds in ethnomusicological research? How does one identify an“area” in globalized spaces? And more generally, how and where do we locate “the Caribbean?” We will begin by surveying a number of important early scholars working in the Caribbean basin (Carpentier, Cesaire, Herskovits,Ortiz, among others), assessing how their influence has shaped our present conceptions. We will then turn to a number of scholars from outside of ethnomusicology whose work has exerted considerable influence on more recent scholarship (Benítez-Rojo, Clifford, Duany, Flores, Gilroy Hall, Roach, et.al.). We will finally turn our attention to a number of recent ethnomusicological studies of the Caribbean (Averill, Guilbault, Largey, Moore,Manuel, Ochoa, Veal, Wade, among others) analyzing how each author grapples with the larger questions of place and the post-colonial conditions fully reverberant with varied notions of homeland, diaspora, cultural pride, alienation, and displacement.

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The purpose of this course is to become familiar with some of the classical social science literature about the arts. We will focus on material that is significant to the development of critical modes of thinking about music. For this version of the course we will highlight the relation between culture, nature, language and diversity, focusing on some of the debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.This focus for the course was chosen because of the significance that these topics have today: the relation between biology, environment and culture is seen as crucial to gaining new understandings of the definition of culture itself, and this relation is being posited as a response to some of the impasses of contemporary identity theories. The course will also explore how the relation between nature, language and music was forged in large part by the colonial-modern global world system. Today the question of epistemology is being transformed by a rethinking of disciplines not solely as emergent in Europe but in the multiple cosmopolitan relations generated by the colonial-modern world system. Therefore, during the second half of the course we will consider the issue of pluralism and its relation to Atlantic crossings, focusing in particular on Native South American ethnographies and histories.

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This course introduces the cultural study of music and performance through a specific focus on South, West and Southeast Asian music and society. Modern perspectives on music, including the study of ethnomusicology, are redefining ideas of place,tradition and cultural meaning as part of an interrelated global history. But although this course is geographically diverse, it will relate this broader perspective through close attention to several distinct South and Southeast Asian styles. We will focus in turn on Hindustani and Karnatic musical traditions of India, Bollywood film song, Sufi qawwali performance and religious practices of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as Javanese and Balinese gamelan orchestras. Each of these genres and musiccultures will be described locally – in society, religion, politics, and identity - and in context of postcolonial, technological, and transnational development. Points of discussion will include the changing balance of traditional and modern ideas of music in systems of learning, performance techniques, ways of writing and recording music, and the social concept of music itself. No previous background in music is required.

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This course is designed to present current issues in ethnomusicology within their intellectual and historical contexts. We situate ethnomusicology in relation to a wide range of disciplines and approaches that have investigated music as an “object” of academic inquiry. These disciplines include: cultural and linguistic anthropology, semiotics, cultural studies, the “new” musicology,” social history, popular music studies and performance studies. In social scientific scholarship on music over the past two decades, issues of race, gender, subjectivity, globalization and cultural ownership have come to the fore. Working with select case studies from contemporary scholarship, we situate these within their specific disciplinary genealogies and intellectual histories. What can we gain from thinking about musical experience, musical form and musical sound through the multiple analytic frameworks presented by the social sciences? What challenges does the study of music present to our understandings of social life? (This course is designated as a “swing” course and is thus simultaneously offered as both an upper level undergraduate course and a graduate seminar.

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In Latin America, there has been a strong and lasting relationship between music and literature. In this course we will explore how the relationship between the sonic and the written has been constitutive of a Latin American public sphere, marked by different moments of musical recontextualization. The course is historically structured. It begins by exploring travelers’ accounts in the region in the late nineteenth century and how they “heard” Latin America. From there, we will explore developments in the early twentieth century and contrast how different countires – particularly Colombia, Brasil, Cuba and Argentina – mediated the relationship between the lettered word, ethnography, sound circulation technologies and music.

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This advanced undergraduate/graduate course examines music in the lives of survivors of traumatic experiences, discovering why music is a special expressive resource for such people and also learning things from survivorss' music about the nature of traumatic events that other expressive and documentary resources do not tell us about. Drawing on examples from around the world, we consider these questions from a number of social, cultural, psychological, and musicological perspectives. No prior music background or coursework is required.

THIS IS A SWING COURSE -- UNDERGRADUATES MUST ATTEND THE THURSDAY AS WELL AS TUESDAY SECTIONS. GRADUATE STUDENTS NEED ONLY ATTEND THE TUESDAY SECTIONS.

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This class considers the question:"what does it mean to 'own' music?" While we begin with a discussion of the philosophical issues entailed in this question, we turn quickly to two primary subjects: the debates over digital "filesharing" and the debates over the disposition of "field"recordings of Native American and other indigenous musical traditions. We consider the ideas of "copyright," "intellectual property," and "cultural property" through case studies, and through close readings of major portions of Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture and Michael Brown's Who Owns Native Culture? We will spend the last part of the course exploring the instructor's ongoing project to repatriate recordings of Iñupiat ("Eskimo") songs made in 1946, and currently"owned" by Columbia University, in partnership with the Iñupiat community of Alaska's North Slope. Through a close look at "community partnered" musical repatriation in Alaska, we will examine the many legal, ethical, and cultural complexities that shape concepts of "ownership"and practices of owning and controlling these recordings. Students will be expected to write two short (5-10 page) papers and one final original research paper (15-20 pages) dealing with music for which ownership and rights of use are contested. Other assignments will include developing a bibliography and an outline for the final paper.

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