MUSC- Music

EDP, H- This course is for students with no prior music training. Students explore music and human behavior related to music across time and in cultures across the world, including the physics of musical instruments and their design and construction, the creation and maintenance of group identity through sound-making and related physical movement, and the diffusion of music culture via demographic change resulting from war, colonialism, slavery, technological innovations, or political or religious movements. Students gain a practical foundation for understanding the ideas and behaviors related to musical traditions and the basic elements of music.

EDP, H- This course is designed for students with no prior music training. Students will explore the major eras and forms of popular music in the United States ¿ blackface minstrelsy, brass band music, the Tin Pan Alley songwriting tradition, American musical theater, ragtime, the syncopated orchestra, jazz, blues, country music, rhythm & blues, and rock and roll ¿ in their cultural and historical contexts, including colonialism, capitalism, the African diaspora and the slave trade, migration and other demographic change, the U.S. legal system, the impact of war and other major historical events, and the tension between dominant classes and minority populations from which many music traditions have emerged. Students will also gain a practical foundation for analysis of musical documents by exploring basic elements of songwriting, musical arrangement, recording technology, and the process of record making and promotion.

EDP, H- This course is for students with no prior music training. Students will explore the foundational elements of the jazz tradition in the United States, including African antecedents, music in African American slave culture (the ring shout, field hollers, spirituals, and work songs), and the basic structures and style periods of jazz and its culture, including ragtime, the syncopated orchestra, early New Orleans jazz, big band swing, the bebop movement, cool jazz, hard bop, the avant garde movement, jazz-rock fusion, neo-traditionalism of the 1980s, and jazz as an international musical discourse. The course will also consider the framing of jazz as a symbolic discourse in relation to ideas such as Black nationalism, democracy, and individual freedom. Students gain a practical foundation for analysis of basic elements of music (the evolution of standard jazz song forms; the role and theoretical underpinnings of improvisation) and of the historical, political and cultural context surrounding the birth and evolution of jazz, including the role of European colonialism, the American and trans-Atlantic slave economy, and the use of jazz as a tool in Civil Rights discourse.