Category: Fall, 2008-9
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.
CU Directory of Classes Link
read more »
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.
CU Directory of Classes Link
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.
CU Directory of Classes Link
read more »
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.
CU Directory of Classes Link (undergraduate, V3440)
CU Directory of Classes Link (graduate, G6440)
read more »
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.
CU Directory of Classes Link
read more »
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.
CU Directory of Classes Link
read more »
“…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.
CU Directory of Classes Link
read more »
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.
CU Directory of Classes Link
read more »
