Only sound, music, and voices that are listened to register in popular consciousness and become part of culture and history. This course surveys literature in the ethnomusicology, anthropology, and sound studies of listening, foregrounding often invisible listeners and cultures of listening that make audibility possible and set its requirements. In a world-spanning investigation of cultures of listening, we consider the role of listening in crafting soundscapes, recordings, and voices, with particular attention to modern technological transformations of listening culture. We consider alternative cultures of listening, including considering what listening means beyond sound; and we turn our attention to the margins of societies, cultures, and histories which can be heard if we learn how to listen.

Hip-Hop and the City is a multidisciplinary graduate course that will use hip-hop music and culture as a lens to explore historical urban issues; as a medium to think about how urban issues shape cultural expression and how culture shapes cities; and finally as a platform for students to develop innovative solutions to critical urban challenges of today. Students will acquire a solid grounding in hip-hop music and culture, and a deeper knowledge of how it relates to critical urban issues of the 20th/21st century.

This seminar examines the use of music to make a variety of land-based claims, from asserting land rights to justifying ethnic nationalism, and from defining vernacular traditions to imagining diasporic selves. Course readings will focus on traditional and popular musics from the early 20th century to the present, highlighting intersections with literature and visual arts. Students are encouraged to apply the theoretical and practical approaches explored in this seminar to their own areas of study.

Cities are noisy, musical places, brimming with wanted and unwanted sounds. They are sites of coexistence and conflict where competition for literal and metaphorical space becomes audible. Musical genres and scenes are born in cities, and can die there as well as Even when the urban environment is not its focus, much contemporary music scholarship takes place in cities as field site and/or as locus of academic knowledge production. This graduate seminar explores the intersection of music, sound, noise and cities relevance through a selective survey of contemporary scholarship from ethnomusicology, sound studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, and urban studies. Themes include theories of sound and space; music and the urban Global South; "multicultural" music in cities of the Global North; and music in economic, urban, and cultural policy.

After an opening unit on ancient and early modern texts about the relations between music, affect, and anatomy, we will organize our studies around topics including synaesthesia and cross-modal perception, from Castel's Ocular Harpsichord to Scriabin's Prometheus and Mysterium projects; madness in opera (including mad scenes by Donizetti and Schoenberg); and what we might call pharma-musicology, including the opiate (Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique) and the psychedelic (Funkadelic/Parliament).

The concept of diegetic music coined by Michel Chion in 1985 continues to be a central issue in film music studies. Diegetic music is that which is heard by the characters in a film, as opposed to the non-diegetic musical accompaniment (i.e., film score) heard only by the film’s audience. In this seminar, we will begin by looking at film music scholarship prior to Chion (e.g., Sergei Eisenstein and Christian Metz) and afterwards (e.g., Rick Altman and Ben Winters). The bulk of the seminar will be spent listening to the many ways in which filmmakers cross the "fantastical gap between diegetic and non-diegetic" (Robynn Stillwell), in selected films — both in and out of Hollywood — from the twenties to the present.

This seminar investigates the enduring place of Orpheus and Orphic mythology in musico-dramatic expression over the centuries. Prized for his powers of musical expression, Orpheus has fascinated, haunted, inspired, and empowered many composers and creative artists (including Monteverdi, Charpentier, Rameau, Gluck, Haydn, Offenbach, Milhaud, Stravinsky, Birtwistle, Saariaho). Building on the narratives of Ovid and Virgil, this seminar investigates changing representations and interpretations of this iconic singer, character, instrumentalist, poet, rhetorician, philosopher, sage, and shaman in opera, ballet, film, and production videos. Students will be encouraged to probe aspects of vocal authority and performed meanings, and develop independent research projects.

Various kinds of mixing (e.g., racial, cultural) have been paramount in Latin America and the Caribbean, deeply informing musical sounds and practices, notions of national identity and more. This seminar will examine key scholarship on music that takes up questions of mestizaje, mestiçagem, créolité, and any number of other discourses of hybridity in the Latin American/Caribbean context. We will situate this investigation in relation to foundational writing such as Freyre's The Masters and the Slaves and Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint, that have shaped the meanings of hybrid cultures in the region(s). A central goal will be to better understand the processes, politics, and stakes for musical/cultural mixing and interrelationships between hybridities and music cultures in nation-states such as Brazil, Cuba, Peru, Haiti, etc. This course will also provide support for TAs assigned to MUS305, Music Cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean, which will be offered concurrently as an Arts and Sciences course.

The seminar will involve readings and discussion on subjects selected by the course instructor. Each student will be required to submit a 'publication quality' paper on a subject related to the seminar and approved by the instructor, and to make a scholarly presentation of the same material.

This seminar offers an issues-based approach to the study of music and philosophy: both the philosophy of music and, more broadly, intersections of philosophy and music. Its purview may range from intellectual history and the Continental tradition of philosophical aesthetics, through recent theoretical approaches to music in conjunction with critical humanistic thought –– cultural and literary studies, critical theory, psychoanalysis, sound and media studies, sociology, and ethics. Topics will vary, but may include philosophical understandings of music and musicality in relation to language, sense and embodiment, time and consciousness, or changing concepts of ineffability, utopia, and the sublime.

This course identifies and considers keywords for the study of contemporary African music and sound. Each week we will foster discussion around a keyword and a constellation of case studies. We will engage with scholarship from across the humanistic disciplines and read authors from on and off the African continent. The sonic practices we will encounter range from Congolese rumba bands to Tunisian trance singers; from loudspeakers atop Nigerian mosques to honk horns from Ghanaian lorries; from listening practices in South African midwifery to Uganda's repatriation of colonial-era sound archives.

By exploring the interconnections between contemporary African sound communities, we will identify and discuss keywords arising in current scholarship, including technologies like the amplifier and the hard drive, spaces like the studio and the city, and analytics like pleasure and hotness. We will also engage with established concepts for the study of postcolonial African cultures, including nationalism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, diaspora, and pan-Africanism. Altogether, this graduate seminar will introduce students to influential concepts in contemporary Africanist scholarship, and ask them to reflect on the stakes and significance of theorizing about African sound.

Starting from the supposition that intellectual developments shape musical life and culture, this course surveys philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates waged during the second half of the eighteenth century in an attempt to understand how the "Enlightenment" informed and shaped musical expression. How did music participate in intellectual and ideological life? How did ideas circulating in the 18th century take shape musically? What premises did both composers and philosophers share? How were rationalism, religious tolerance, abolitionism, liberalism, revolutionary movements, entrepreneurism, geographical expansion, travel and exploration, sociability, the nascent women’s movement, and other markers of change and social mobility manifested musically? In short, how did musical creators, users, listeners, and interpreters become enlightened?

This seminar is a historical and theoretical inquiry into the construction and reflection of identities in popular music and by popular music performers, audiences, and discourses. Using readings and examples from both Western and Non-Western popular musics we will pay particular attention to race, sexuality, gender, class, and how they intersect with and inform various genres, styles, formal characteristics, and issues surrounding musical production, technology, and dissemination. Musical identities of local and global location, scenes, and subcultures will also be discussed. Theoretical and interpretive approaches to be introduced and discussed include deconstruction, performance and reception theory and various aspects of postmodern and post-colonial theory.

Processes of East Asian 'modernization' have brought with them revolutions in the practical and conceptual life of music in the region. In this course we consider the social power of music and its transformations in modern Japan, China and Korea, attentive to the themes that unite them. We consider Korean and Chinese assimilations of Western and Japanese notions of the modern, tradition, culture and music, and other legacies of Japanese colonialism; the impact of war on music; East Asian revolutionary socialisms and music; the capitalist transformations of East Asian musical culture, including the rise of popular music industries and the transformation of nightlife culture; the canonization of traditional music as national culture; the utility of music in East Asian modernity’s everyday lives; and other issues. We examine the role that music has played in these transformations, and their specific consequences for musical practice.

This course is designed to complement current offerings in ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music's Music History and Culture graduate program. The course guides students through interdisciplinary literature related to the broad theme of circulation, which has been applied to the study of music and communication, politics, mass media, and other contemporary phenomenon. As such, it will be relevant to student research projects in a variety of subject areas.

This seminar will consider how the category of "nature" has been constructed in nineteenth-century music-compositional discourses and in critical rhetoric about music of the nineteenth century, including aesthetic, theoretical, interpretive, and analytical writings from the contemporary to the present day. "Nature" is an exceedingly complex term, pertaining not only to the physical world — typically conceptualized as a given entity and a priori defined as "wilderness" — but also to broader concepts of essentiality, including the fundamental character and disposition of individuals.

This seminar, then, considers the idea of nature in relation to nineteenth-century music not only in expected programmatic and mimetic-musical senses, but via a broader critical understanding of the ways in which the term "nature” accrues ideological meanings in discourses about music, from the assumed primacy of the overtone series as a foundation for harmonic language through the musico-dramatic representation of "degeneracy," and beyond.

This course provides an issues-based approach to sonic arts in the Middle East. Issues to be considered include music and sound's symbolism in religious and secularist movements; music in twentieth century Middle Eastern nationalisms and current transnational identifications; repertoire and innovation in folk and art music; sung poetry; media, technology, and politics; populism and popular music; and discourses and experiences of tradition and modernity as reflected in and through engagement with sound. Emphasis will be placed on listening and analysis of sound as well as critical engagement with assigned texts.

Despite music's often-discussed ephemerality, music practice and scholarship are both deeply entangled with the material. For example, where would musicians be without instruments (including their bodies)? What would music research be without analyzable items such as scores, recordings, transcriptions, images of music making, instruments, and the like? This seminar focuses on the many ways that musical sounds, practices, and meanings inform and are informed by relationships between musicking people and "things." We will examine how researchers have studied different types of musical objects as a means of understanding, not only the objects themselves, but also music, musicians, music cultures, and more. Finally, we will explore emergent directions and new possibilities for music research inspired by Actor-Network Theory, Thing Theory, Vital Materialism, and Posthumanism.

This seminar offers a critical interrogation of changing practices and ideologies of musical listening since the Enlightenment, and the various technologies and discourses that have both shaped and reflected the development of listening habits, attitudes, and values. Incorporating topics and case studies from historical eras before and after sound capture, and drawing upon approaches and perspectives from music scholarship, philosophies of music and of listening, and the burgeoning interdiscipline of sound studies, it considers music’s inextricable entanglements with material culture alongside the ongoing fascination with sound's ephemerality, music's seeming ineffability, and the special position of disembodied sound in the Western imagination.

Sometimes ethnomusicologists find themselves without music. After all, music only accounts for a portion of social life. Do the ethnographic and analytical strategies of ethnomusicology shed light on other kinds of social practice? Some people — for physiological, psychological, social, or economic reasons — disavow or cease to practice music. How can ethnomusicologists research individuals, groups and cultural forms that have disappeared or been hidden — whether this removal is from the symbolic layers of the public sphere, or more existentially, on the level of bare life — through socio-economic transformation, censorship, migration, or even genocide?

A survey of the past, present and future of 'analysis' as a category in ethnomusicology. We study the analysis of music in early ethnomusicology as pure sound, the turn towards 'cultural analysis,' and the war between the 'musicological' and anthropological camps in the late-20th century history of the discipline; and we seek ways of overcoming the fallacious distinction between 'musical' and 'contextual' analysis. Most of all, we discover ways that analysis can be useful to the leading edges of ethnomusicological thought — the move towards sound studies, towards the 'everyday,' towards the post-human, and the inquiry into music beyond the auditory, to name a few.

For doctoral students in ethnomusicology who have completed their field research and are in the process of writing their dissertations. The year-long course will meet every other week for three hours. Students will take turns sharing dissertation chapters in progress or other substantial dissertation-related materials (e.g., fieldnotes, field recordings, musical transcriptions) for peer and instructor feedback. In addition, students will read and discuss materials on dissertation and long-form academic writing, complete in-class writing exercises, and learn how to give, receive, and apply constructive feedback on peer writing. Students will leave the course having made progress on their dissertations, having developed their writing and reviewing skills, and having gained exposure to a variety of techniques to move their academic writing forward.

Independent research by doctoral students, under the supervision of a faculty advisor.

Independent research by doctoral students, under the supervision of a faculty advisor.

A seminar exploring music's social nature, with special attention to the ways 'culture' influences music perception, cognition, and value, and the way musical practices, in turn, influence culture and social relations. Issues addressed include: music education as intercultural education; music, gender, and power; the educational implications of cultural relativity; music education as an agent of social reproduction and/or transformation; social relations implicit in various musical and instructional practices; and music education's moral significance.

The focus of MUS2004H will be on developing music teaching and learning strategies for welcoming children across the developmental periods of early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence into the diverse human practice of musicking. This course offers an alternative to traditional methodologies by encouraging students to develop their own orientation based on a critical examination of bell hooks's philosophy of education as the practice of freedom as well as antiracist and anti-oppressive approaches to music education. Students will build teaching expertise through peer teaching and reflective examination of current practices. Lectures and assignments will include exploring diverse repertoire for students in the elementary grades and an examination of the current research in the field of elementary music education. As part of this course, students are expected to submit a research paper, present a seminar discussion on a chosen topic relating to music in childhood as well as submit and present an individual “teaching project.” The welcoming project will be the preparation of a collection of repertoire and teaching materials.

This course investigates issues of gender/sexuality in queer music performance, participation, listening, and learning practices. Examining musical implications of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, we take up in relationship to music, issues, and topics central to queer theory, such as norms and normativity; identities and dis-identifications; bodies, matter, and mattering; time, temporality and collective movement; queer of colour critique, assemblages, and intersectionalities. Students use methods of analysis appropriate to their expertise and experience (cultural, musical, educational, performer-based) to research queer music genres and scenes of popular (broadly defined) and concert music cultures.