Sacred Sounds: Music in Religious Context
MUSC 124
Fall 2015 Section: 01
Music forms an essential component of many religious practices throughout the world. From a tool for social solidarity to a trigger for intensely personal expression and even violence, the ability of music to shape religious life is tangible and often profound. This course employs the literature of ethnomusicology as a starting point for understanding the role of music in contemporary religious life and how associated artistic practices are implicated in dynamic processes of individual and social transformation. Music scholars employ a variety of interpretive lenses to articulate the meaning of such processes and a number of these will be central to our class discourse, including: hybridity, transnationalism, gender, and identity formation. Students will critically assess these and other theoretical models through an exploration of largely ethnographic research dealing with a variety of broad religious categories: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, animist etc. Points of interreligious interaction will be of particular interest as a means to understand the central position music often plays in drawing groups with competing or conflicting socio-political views into sustained contact with one another.
Popular Music in Contemporary China
MUSC 127
Fall 2015 Section: 01
Crosslisting: CEAS 259
As in the rest of the world, popular music dominates contemporary China’s music industry and consumption. Yet China’s popular music market also presents unique issues of state-sponsored popular culture intersecting with the bottom-up popular taste and desire, the repressive collective “we” intersecting with the resilient individual “I” in artistic expressions, and the imagined “ancient China” intersecting with the modern sound and technology. This course offers an opportunity for students to explore music, aesthetic, political, and cultural meanings contained in popular music through in-depth research projects on a number of important pop musicians and bands in Reform China from the 1980s to the present. Writing at the university level will be emphasized through the written assignments.