MUS 308 - Music as Material Culture

Questions of materiality are surprisingly absent in scholarly accounts of music, which tend to emphasize ideologies of ephemerality and performance, on the one hand, and the transcendent monumentality of “the work,” on the other. Nevertheless, modern musical culture is saturated with things: sheet music, sound recordings, audiovisual materials, digital file formats, and the articulating equipment they require, to name only a few objects of everyday musical consumption and engagement. How can we account for what Jane Bennett (2010) calls the “vibrant” materiality of these musical objects? How do the different materialities of music relate to one another across affective networks of style, genre, and media production? How do musical materials become subjects of knowledge regarding the past? How is that knowledge mobilized in the practice of collecting and managing historic material culture? How might ongoing practices of remediation challenge our assumptions regarding the stabilities of material forms? Employing a variety of methodological perspectives and drawing upon a wide array of listening examples, this course will introduce students to debates regarding music as material culture and question the ontological presuppositions of contemporary music scholarship.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).