100-level courses
Introduction to Ethnomusicology
Course Description: As an ethnomusicologist, I believe that by studying music in their cultural contexts, including one's own, we can learn about the world, the people within it, and what matters to them. This class is designed to introduce you to a range of questions, skills, and approaches that concern ethnomusicologists, including ethnographic research practices, modes of representation, social analysis, and analysis of musical structures. We will consider historical precedents and commercial approaches to “world music” before considering the methodological and ethical concerns that currently shape the discipline, including emerging activist and decolonial frameworks. By the end of the semester, you will have a sense of the variety of approaches to the field that currently exist.
Music as Social Life
Course Description: As an ethnomusicologist, I’m fascinated by the power that music has in our lives; the ways that music helps us connect to and bond with others; or how it can help heal trauma, fight oppressive regimes, soothe, worship, grieve, and play. In this course, we will explore different models that help us understand how music has this capacity, along with different ways of being, thinking, seeing, and sounding. We will pay attention to sound and music in our environment to see what it tells us about our lives. Units may include Music and Ritual, Music and Environment, Music, Politics, and Activism. Ultimately, the course gives you critical tools and frames to apply to your own case studies. Assignments will ask you to practice explaining why music matters.
200-level courses
Music and Ecology
Course Description: This course addresses the increasing global awareness about the ecological realities of human life on this planet and how these realities are mediated through and reflected in sound. We will explore a series of case studies from the U.S. and around the world that take into account the diversity of ways in which people use sound to frame their interactions, experiences, and frustrations with their local ecologies. The course will explore topics including: soundscapes of diverse environments; the overlap between music and animal sounds; music as environmental activism; materials, sustainability, and instruments. In short, it asks how a given environment shapes social, cultural, and sonic life. As such, the course is inherently interdisciplinary in nature: it will draw on the work of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, biologists and bioacousticians, acoustic ecologists, sound recordists, musicians, environmentalists, and activists.
Music and Gender
Course Description: Our world is highly gendered and gender diverse, yet few courses in the conservatory bear witness, or bring a critical lens, to the gendering of musical worlds in time and space. This course seeks to redress that lacuna. Using case studies in historical and contemporary contexts from around the world, the course explores the ways gendered and sexualized identities are encoded in musical practices, repertoires, and performance contexts. In short, how is performance gendered? Conversely, we ask how performance genders our world. To do that we will examine how musical practices and texts create understandings, beliefs, and practices of gender and sexual subjectivities; how bodies and voices are mobilized to perform, reinforce, contest, and resist them; and the social, cultural, and political contexts where music is created, disseminated, and consumed and how they inform resulting interpretations and meanings. We will explore how gender is embodied, sounded, heard, and voiced; the relationships between gender, sex, and sexualities; and the ways musical practices are used to resist binary views of gender and oppressive patriarchal, heteronormative, classist, racialized hierarchies. We will engage gender diversity around the world to illuminate the ways we perceive and understand the expression of gender in the U.S. The approach is an interdisciplinary one drawing on feminist ethnomusicology, musicology, and anthropology, along with gender studies and intersectional theory. Exposing you to some of the key voices in feminist and queer music scholarship, the course will also provide a sense of how music and gender have been studied over the past forty years so that you can better understand where we are now by appreciating where we have been (and where we still need to go). Ultimately, the course gives critical tools--both theoretical paradigms and practical methodologies--to explore the gendering of your own musical worlds through an ethnographic/ oral history project.
Epics, Puppets, and Music: from India to Indonesia (a hybrid class)
Course Description: We will explore the intersection of literary, visual, and performing arts through the ancient epic, the Ramayana. Wayang kulit is a complex art form from Indonesia incorporating music, puppetry, and literature that draws on Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The class has both a theoretical and practical basis, involving experiential and object-based learning. For example, we will spend a couple of days working with the puppets, learning how to classify and identify the characters. In the gamelan component, you will learn about the music that accompanies a wayang kulit (shadow play) performance. Our final project, will involve the class collectively designing and performing our own puppet performance, from writing a script that incorporates a contemporary reading of the Ramayana to designing your own puppets and scoring the music. In order to stage our own performance, we have a set of specific skills and content we need to master. The course has been backwards designed, providing knowledge necessary to undertake the project. For example, to emulate the structure of a wayang, you need to understand it, so we’ll read about it and watch several wayang. In order to write a script, you need to understand the kinds of characters possible. In order to score a wayang, you need to understand the types of music.
Doing Musical Ethnography
Course Description: Music ethnography is a key methodology in the discipline of ethnomusicology. This course introduces ethnographic research methods (i.e. fieldwork) through reading ethnographies, fieldwork manuals, and direct exposure to the work of practicing ethnomusicologists who ground their own work in diverse approaches to ethnomusicological research in the 21st century, including formats for dissemination beyond print. Using tools and practices from the course, students will design their own ethnographic research projects about a musical community and conduct fieldwork throughout the semester that culminates in presenting a musical ethnography in a format of their own choosing.
Building Community Through Music [CBL]
Course Description: Students will assist in teaching a community-engaged musical ensemble for underserved youth in Lorain County. In the first module, you will learn about best practices of community engagement, the emerging field of "community music” and the relationship between ethnomusicology and community-based work; conduct demographic and ethnographic research to understand the local community in which the partner is based; and then turn your attention to pedagogy and designing lesson plans. In the second module you will work directly with the youth as you learn how to facilitate music-making using the Javanese Gamelan.
Decolonizing Ethnomusicology: Moving from Colonial Approaches of Extraction to Community Engagement
Course Description: What does it mean to decolonize ethnomusicology? This course moves from a consideration of colonial practices of extraction to models of community-engaged collaboration, repatriation and dissemination, while critically examining and engaging the discourse of “decolonization.” The first module employs a hands-on approach to history by engaging primary source materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries focusing on colonial technologies (e.g. phonograph), institutions (e.g. archives, museums, educational institutions, recording industry, world’s fairs), and individuals. The second module shifts our attention to practices and methodologies necessary in any attempt to decolonize, including prioritization of BIPOC voices. The class is part intellectual history of the anthropological and ethnomusicological engagement with sound, part examination of how knowledge is produced and disseminated, and part methodology (how we could do research and disseminate it). Each student will work on personal contributions to the class Digital Humanities site in order to make knowledge publicly accessible.
300-level courses
Musical Thinking: Analysis of World Music [counts as upper-level Music Theory]
Course Description: Ethnomusicology has long been defined as the study of music in its sociocultural context or as some combination of anthropological and musicological approaches, but in recent times there have been claims that the discipline has focused on the anthropological to the detriment of the musical, that analysis of music has gone by the wayside. This class is an effort to redress the situation, to bring attention to the sounds themselves, how they work, and why this matters. It is an advanced seminar in how people think about and structure music around the world, including the ways it is theorized, notated, transcribed, and analyzed. We will examine indigenous approaches to theory (sometimes called ethnotheory or ethnoscience) and notational systems. The class emphasizes listening and developing practical skills that we use ourselves. The assessment emphasis will be on analysis and transcription, including experimentation with alternative systems sensitive to the demands of the specific practice. Think of it like a meta-theory class as we question what it means to transcribe, theorize and analyze.
Ethnomusicology as Activism [CBL]
Course Description: This course explores how skills developed through the study of ethnomusicology can be applied to real-world problems. How might we become advocates for social and environmental justice or use music to contribute to conflict resolution? The first module explores the field of applied ethnomusicology and best practices in community-engaged learning. The second module is practical: students will partner with a community organization, thinking about how to use music to help the organization achieve their goals.
