The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, The Buchmann-Mehta School of Music

Name of Course: Music and Society: A Global Perspective

Annual, 2017-2018

M.A Seminar, 2 hour weekly course

The course will be held in English.

Name of Lecturer: Ofer Gazit
Tel: TBA
Email: TBA

Reception time:

appointment by email

Course requirements
participation in discussion, weekly reading, three short essays (2-3 p.), one final project (10-12 p.)

Description of course

This course presents selected musical traditions from around the world. We will explore how these musical traditions shape and are shaped by the cultural frameworks in which they are performed and listen. We will analyze and compare how forms of listening to music, theoretical systems, and different performance practices reflect different cultural perspectives.

The course is organized around to a series of cases studies from around the world, including music from the African Diaspora, Music in the Islamic world, and music in various Roma communities. Through musical examples from these cases we will discuss the role of music in everyday life, the relationship between music and politics, music social class, gender, and ethnicity and how music is involved in issues of social identity and exclusion.

Course topics

• Unit 1: Music in the Global Age
  • Music in/as Culture
  • Music and Difference
  • Circulation
• Unit 2: music of the African Diaspora.
  • West Africa
  • Caribbean
  • North America
• Unit 3: Music in the Islamic Word
  • The debate on music’s morality.
  • Maqam system
  • Call to prayer and contour analysis
  • Um Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafaz
  • Music in Sufism
    • Dhiker
    • Gnawa
    • Qawalli
• Unit 4: Roma Music
  • Roots and Routes
  • Balkan
  • Jazz Manouche
  • Flamenco
  • Gypsy Punk

Grading Summary

• 20% Musical Autobiography
• 20% African Diaspora paper
• 20% Music and Islam paper
• 40% Final Seminar

Bibliography

Agawu, Kofi. 2003. Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. NY: Routledge.

Blum, Stephen. 2009. “Modes of Theorizing in Iranian Khorasan,” Ch. 11 in Theorizing the Local, 207-24.

Chang, Jeff. 2005. “Sipple Out Deh: Jamaica’s Roots Generation and the Cultural Turn.” In Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Feld, Steven and Annemette Kirkegaard. 2010. “Entangled Complicities in the Prehistory of "World Music": Poul Rovsing Olsen and Jean Jenkins Encounter Brian Eno and David Byrne in the Bush of Ghosts” in Popular Musicology Online. http://www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/04/feld.html

Flores, Juan. 1998. "Recapturing History: The Puerto Rican Roots of Hip Hop Culture." Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music and Identity in New York. 61-73.

Hall, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Kelley, Robin D. G., 2012. Africa speaks, America answers: Modern jazz in revolutionary times. Harvard University Press.

Manuel, Peter. “Flamenco in Focus,” Chap. 3 in Tenzer (2006).

Manuel, Peter 1998. “Representations of New York City in Latin Music.” in Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music and Identity in New York, 23-43.

McAlister, Elizabeth. A. 2002. Rara!: vodou, power, and performance in Haiti and its diaspora (Vol. 1). University of California Press.

Murthy, Dhiraj. 2007. “A South Asian American diasporic aesthetic community? Ethnicity and New York City's' Asian electronic music scene.” Ethnicities, 7(2), 225-247.

Mullins, Steven. 2010. Flamenco Gestures: Musical Meaning in Motion. Doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Racy, Ali Jihad 2004. Making Music in the Arab World: The culture and artistry of tarab. Cambridge University Press.

Rasmussen, Ann and Lornell, Kip. 1997. Musics of Multicultural America: A Study of Twelve Musical Communities. New York: Schirmer Books.

Rivera, Raquel. 2003. “Whose Hip Hop?: The Late 1980s and Early 1990s.” In New YorkRicans from the Hip Hop Zone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Romero, Brenda M. 2015. “A Theory of Infinite Variation,” in Discourses in African Musicology: J.H. Kwabena Nketia Festschrift. Kwasi Ampene and Godwin Kwafo Adje, editors. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Maize Books, 124-154.

Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 2012. “Rethinking the urban community: (Re) mapping musical processes and places.” Urban People 14(2): 207-226.

Silverman, Carol. 2012.  American Musicspheres : Romani Routes : Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. Oxford University Press.

Stanyek, Jason. 2004. “Transmissions of an interculture: Pan-African jazz and intercultural improvisation.” The other side of nowhere: Jazz, improvisation, and communities in dialogue, 87-130.

Stone, Ruth M. 2005. Music in West Africa. Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture Series. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tenzer, Michael, editor. 2006. Analytical Studies in World Music, New York: Oxford University Press.

Veal, Michael E. 2007. Dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in Jamaican reggae. Wesleyan University Press.                                                           

Wolf, Richard K. ed. 2009. Theorizing the Local, Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wong, Deborah. 2006. “Ethnomusicology and difference.” Ethnomusicology, 50(2), 259-279.