Category: Undergraduate Class
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 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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