Punk Rock
Punk rock is simultaneously a music genre and a lifestyle, an attitude and a philosophy, a political orientation and a commodified fashion. Insiders, outsiders, in-betweeners—everyone’s perspective on punk is different, distinct, and necessarily individuated. Punk is what you make of it, yes—but it also has rules, boundaries, and its own self-appointed border police: punk is always already what others make of it. In this course, we explore the ideological, musical, and social characteristics of punk rock, its precedents, and its descendants.
Sound and the Sacred
Music plays important roles in religious contexts: among other things, it connects worshippers to spiritual realms, centers practitioners within continuous traditions, distinguishes between sacred and secular spaces (and places), enables communal cohesion, facilitates transcendent experiences, imbues everyday activities with religious intent, orients believers to ritual practices, and contributes to religious identities, both at the individual and the collective (or congregational) levels.
Seminar in Music Industry
In this capstone course for music industry students, we explore contemporary analyses and issues with an eye toward critically assessing and engaging the music industries. Each student brings to the classroom a unique set of skills and experiences, including those grounded in coursework and experiential learning (such as co-ops, internships, research, service learning, study abroad, and other activities). During seminar, we learn together as a class from these individualized experiences and sets of expertise—the sum of our knowledge, in essence, is greater than its individual parts.
Popular Music since 1945
This course introduces students to the study of popular music in the United States from the end of World War II to the present day. Instead of presenting a survey of popular music during this period, we consider a handful of selected topics, themes, and genres during these years. Sacrificing historical breadth for analytical depth enables us to dive deeply into specific examples, considering in detail a range of factors that influence popular music’s development and transformation: ethnic and gender identities, music industry practices, race relations, social and political movements, and technological innovations. Students gain a broad overview of the field of popular music studies—with particular attention given to recently-published research—and the field’s methodologies and materials.
Musical Communities of Chicago
This course introduces students to the diverse musical communities of Chicago through texts and media, workshops with local musicians and arts workers, experiential activities, and your own research projects. Our five-week program in Chicago provides a unique opportunity for us to explore a range of musical practices and intersecting issues: arts policy, gentrification, tourism, and urban development, among others. Experiential learning activities are a core of our time together in Chicago as we engage in this city’s musical life. These include attending concerts and festivals together, excursions to historical musical sites within Chicago, interviewing local experts, and soundwalks, among others.
Critical Foundations of Creative Practice Leadership
Creative industries and creative economies are wide-ranging, requiring a diverse array of skills and practices for individuals and organizations to make an impact. While you may not be able to control factors like audience tastes, business trends, entrenched power hierarchies, and the social logic of groups and collectives, you can control your preparedness for these factors and enhance your ability to analyze and respond to historical, contemporary, and upcoming trajectories and changes. In this class we will explore, analyze, and criticize a wide variety of theoretical and empirical frameworks that have been deployed to explain the structures, trends, and disruptions in creative industries.
Ethnography in Creative Industries
In this course, we consider the various roles that ethnography can play in creative industries. What do we learn from ethnography? For what purposes is ethnographic research best suited? How might ethnography contribute to strategic decision-making? What unique methodological issues might ethnographic research in creative industries pose? In what ways could ethnography enrich creative practice and artmaking? How have the social sciences reacted to the ethnography of creative industries?
Introduction to Music Industry
This course introduces students to a wide array of standard business practices, roles, and norms in the music industries, with a focus on U.S. markets. We address a variety of content areas and business sectors: artist relationships and management, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, international markets, the live music industry, music and other forms of media or entertainment (radio, TV, film, video games, advertising, etc.), and the recorded music industry.
Music Industry Research Methodology
This course introduces students to a number of research methodologies and analytical approaches used in music industry studies and the music industry itself. As an interdisciplinary area, music industry methods draw from disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and business. Success as a scholar of or professional in the music industry frequently depends upon one’s ability to collect, interpret, and analyze data from a variety of sources and perspectives.
Music Industry Co-op Seminar
This directed study is designed specifically for graduate students in the Masters of Science in Music Industry Leadership program who are working on co-op. The course content and activities will help you reflect on the ways in which you are learning, the attitudes and behaviors that influence how you approach professional challenges, the motivators that influence your decision-making, and how this experience relates to your overall career goals. Your overall objective is to gain a deeper and broader understanding of your role’s importance within the music industry. By doing so, you will begin to see interactions and intersections with other professional areas, your academic work, and your prior background and professional work experience.
Historical Traditions: America
In this course, we will survey the musical heritage of the United States in various cultural and stylistic contexts. How has the musical diversity in the U.S. reflected this country’s social and cultural diversity? In what ways has the commercial marketplace affected American musical life? What values have informed the emergence, performance, and consumption of the various genres and styles of art, folk, popular, and sacred musics in the U.S.?
Music, Technology, and Audiences
Technology has been central to the production, distribution, and consumption of music throughout the history of the contemporary music industry. Electronic instruments and recording technologies expand the creative possibilities for artists; media—both in their broadcast and commodity forms—provide opportunities and challenges to music publishers, labels, and distributors; creative and business synergies are found by partnering with other culture industries; and interactive technologies disrupt the top-down industrial paradigm. This course examines the history and socio-cultural contexts of several specific technological developments in the music industry.
Disruptions in the Music Industry
Organizations and individuals in the music industry have long had to balance predictable and successful business and artistic practices against the need for innovation. Changes in such diverse areas as consumer taste, communications technology, copyright law, and recording media function as broad external forces that have preceded and predicated disruptions in the music industry: shifts that significantly alter both the ways in which business is conducted and the music industry’s landscape at large. In this class, we will examine several such case studies in-depth, with a goal of understanding the precedents, circumstances, and ramifications of disruptions throughout the history of the music industry.
Music of Southeast Asia
In this course, we will examine the ways in which communities, their representation(s), and musical life are interrelated throughout Southeast Asia. How might musical activities affect communal bonds organized around shared experiences and histories of colonialism, nationalism, religion, and tradition in Southeast Asia? What roles do musical commodities, economies, identities, and subcultures play in contemporary Southeast Asian cultures? To what degree is Anderson’s idea of the imagined community useful to scholars of musical life in social worlds that are both increasingly globalized and increasingly fragmented?
Discover/Explore Chicago’s Music Scene
This course introduces students to the diverse musical offerings in the Chicago metropolitan area. Students will learn about the wide variety of music- and arts-related activities across many genres and styles. In addition to the excursions taken during Immersion Week and throughout the Fall Quarter, class discussions will focus on topics central to understanding Chicago’s music scene in both its historical and contemporary contexts.
Beginning Central Javanese Gamelan
Our beginning central Javanese gamelan ensembles course provides a practical introduction to the colotomic (structural) and balungan (melodic skeleton) instruments in a typical ensemble. We primarily focus on pieces in the lancaran and bubaran forms (Yogya and Jakarta traditional repertoire) because their shortness and repetitiveness are both useful for familiarity with new instruments.
Introduction to World Music
In this course, we will examine the social and cultural role of music(s) and musical experiences around the world, with special attention to the role of music in discourses regarding multiculturalism in the United States. How does music structure individual and collective identity? How do aesthetics, ideals, politics, and values shape musical experiences? How might we begin to understand culturally- and contextually-specific attitudes towards localism and globalization, appropriation and syncretism, individual and collective interests, exclusion and inclusion, art and commerce, resistance and conformity through music?
Intermediate Central Javanese Gamelan
Our intermedia central Javanese gamelan ensembles course is available to current members of Friends of the Gamelan who have completed the beginning course. Students gain more experience on the the colotomic (structural) and balungan (melodic skeleton) instruments, and are exposed to some of the elaborating instruments used in a typical ensemble. We primarily focus on pieces in the ladrang forms (Yogya and Jakarta traditional repertoire), which are more complicated than the lancarans and buburans taught in the beginning course but not as lengthy as gendhings.
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