Music 650 - Current Topics/Music History

This course will provide graduate students in all Music Department areas the opportunity to deeply explore a bounded topic in musical culture by examining it through a historical lens. This course is defined by its focus on historiography, in other words the question of how a particular topic within musical culture has been established, explained, theorized, and debated by people over time. Thus, another theme of the course regardless of its specific focus in a given semester 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 2025 Topic:
In this seminar, students will learn the history of sampling, quotation, and other forms of musical borrowing, emphasizing how musicians and scholars have theorized and analyzed these musical techniques. Topics to be explored include: appropriation, hybridity, and intertextuality; copyright, intellectual property, and piracy; digital audio and other recording techniques; related compositional techniques including remixes, mashups, allusions, interpolations, collages, and contrafacts; organology (musical instruments) and sampling/quotation; how sampling and quotation construct and reflect ideas about race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and colonization. Musical examples will draw on a broad history of Western music (from the medieval era to the present) with a particular focus on 20th and 21st century genres including hip hop, musique concrete, and a variety of electronic musics. Students will experiment with multiple scholarly methods to produce an original research project analyzing a musical work of their choice.