Intro to World Musics

This course is designed as an introduction to select world music traditions and to ethnomusicology, a discipline many define as the study of music in culture. We focus on three world areas: North India, Brazil, and Senegal. For each of these units, we examine various genres and musical systems and explore music's connection to ritual, belief, aesthetic ideals, politics, and social organization, asking what makes music meaningful for practitioners and audiences. Lectures and discussions are supplemented by regular guest lecture-demonstrations, films and hands-on workshops. Because students interpret the musical works as they represent the ideas and artifacts of human culture and analyze the connections between these and varied human experiences and perceptions of the world, this course may be used to partially fulfill the general education requirement Analytical Inquiry: Society and Culture. Prerequisite for music majors: MUAC 2051.