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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