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Starting from the belief that music is defined by the human experiences it characterizes, this course focuses on introducing undergraduate students to a transcultural analytical perspective of music, challenging existing boundaries between genres and physical locations.
Following a holistic approach, epitomized by Alan Merriam's tripartite model for studying musical cultures, the interconnectedness of concept (the ideas and beliefs about music), behavior (the practices and interactions involving music), and sound (the actual music produced) are emphasized to understand music within its cultural context. 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 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 fundamentals of World Music, but also to what we can learn to enhance our comprehension, appreciation, and performance of the emerging transcultural musical environments that surround us.
Students are called to observe how musical practices collectively express, shape, and allow individuals and groups to construct and negotiate identity, ethnicity, genre, language, migration, spirituality, and globalization. By assessing contemporary 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.
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 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:
- Identify and appreciate diverse world music genres based on their aesthetic differences.
- Procure an analysis of world music songs and music using a simplified version of Lomax’s cantometrics, considering socio-cultural performative dimensions.
- Trace distinct- and blended-world music genres within their respective historical, sociocultural, and global contexts.
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| Literatur |
Feld, S. (2017). On post-ethnomusicology alternatives: Acoustemology. Perspectives on a 21st century comparative musicology: Ethnomusicology or transcultural musicology, 82-98.
Greve, M., & Stone-Davis, F. J. (2016). Writing against Europe: On the Necessary Decline of Ethnomusicology. By Martin Greve. Translated by Férdia J. Stone-Davis. Ethnomusicology Translations, (3), 1-13.
Nettl, B., Turino, T., Wong, I., Capwell, C., Bolman, P., Dueck, B., & Rommen, T. (2015). Excursions in world music. Routledge.
Titon, J. T. (2016). Worlds of music: an introduction to the music of the world's peoples. Cengage Learning.
Wood, A. L., Kirby, K. R., Ember, C. R., Silbert, S., Passmore, S., Daikoku, H., ... & Savage, P. E. (2022). The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture. Plos one, 17(11), e0275469. |
