MUS 222 - Topics in American Music

This course studies selected examples of music created since 1800, focusing on musical activity in the Americas, with particular emphasis on the United States. Repertory will include concert music, popular genres, and music-making in both public and private contexts in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In discerning and critically examining questions pertaining to race, gender, place, and migration-and learning how to formulate music-historical questions of their own interest-students will be introduced to music history, sometimes known as musicology, not as a static body of knowledge but as a practice of inquiry that continues to evolve in compelling ways.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Music 222 can be taken independently of Music 221.
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).