Details
INSTRUCTOR: Niurca Marquez
SECTION: RVGA
SCHEDULE: Online (Summer A)
Course Description
Aural Engagement: Music, Religion and Culture
This course introduces students to the interrelations between music and society from a global perspective. Music has always been and remains a means to teach, express, reinforce, and sometimes change cultural belief systems and identities. Music will be the primary investigatory lens in this course through which students will engage cultural performances from both a static and evolutionary perspective, including the hybridization of musical traditions. This course provides a foundational framework for fundamental elements of music (rhythm, form, and pitch, including melodic and harmonic relationships) by examining their differences and modes of expression in varied cultural traditions. Additionally it explores how said expression in conjunction with our scientific understanding of how we hear and how sound is manipulated and packaged today shapes our aural engagement with the spaces we inhabit. Attention will be paid to the effects of music on cultural appropriation, interpretation, perception, and performance (e.g. through the lenses of gender, orientation, ethnicity, disability/anomalies). During the course, students will begin their exploration with analysis of general scientific and evolutionary perspectives and then continue into holistic study of the Americas with considerations of roots in Europe and Africa.