Music 690C - Topics in Musical Culture

This course will provide graduate students in all Music Department areas the opportunity to deeply explore a bounded musical topic by examining it through a historical or historiographical lens. Regardless of the topic selected for a given iteration of this class, the class will always be defined by its focus on historiography, in other words the question of how a particular topic has been established, explained, theorized, and debated by people over time. Thus, one focus of the course regardless of its specific topic will be introducing students to the methods and practices of musicological research.

Undergraduate Music majors may enroll with Instructor permission only.
Request SPIRE enrollment by submitting a Music Dept Course Override Form.

Fall 2023's iteration of this seminar, "Race, Gender, and Rock," will will explore the history of U.S. popular music from the early twentieth century to the present, focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on styles associated with rock music (including rock's prehistory in R&B, the blues, country and folk musics, and rock n' roll, as well as the many styles of music that developed in response to and in reaction against it in later eras). We will read primary source material as well as scholarship probing these musics and their histories from a variety of angles, including most prominently the way evolving genres have interacted with issues of race and gender, as well as class.