Diverse Cultures and their Musics Spring 2021

  This will be our final blog where your turn the gaze of ethnomusicology back around your direction.  Most of us have our first musical experiences with our families, and you can often give credit for some of your personal musical taste to those experiences--whether you share those opinions or rebel against them. Too, one of the Big Points of this class is to explore how music and culture are interrelated, and cultures are built out of families. So for this blog, you're going to find out more about how someone in your family relates to music. Specifically, I want you to pick someone that's at least one generation older than you and interview them about their relationship with music. You might talk with them about the music of their childhood, or as teenagers, or what they listen to today, or all three. We talked about potential questions in class and I posted them to Canvas. If possible, resist the urge to email your mom a bunch of questions and have her send the answers back...

  As we’ve already begun to notice, participation in music and the related arts is often proscribed by the gender of the potential participator. For instance, we've noticed that drumming in Native American music has traditionally been performed by men, but in recent years women--especially younger women--have begun to drum as well. And, though we didn't talk about it much, I've never seen a video of a traditional Andean harpist who is female--though we did see several female singers. We'll observe more of these disparities as we go on.  For your Music and Gender Blog, I want you all to muse on how music and gender have intersected in your own musical experiences. Have different genders listened to different types of music, or  been expected   to listen to different types of music? Within the style of music that you like to listen to, does the media treat different genders differently? If you've had experience in any sort of music ensembles yourself, have you not...

   Time for some  serious  bloggin'.  For this blog, rather than exploring one of our class cultures further or turning the ethnomusicological spotlight back on your own experiences, you're going to select a unique topic, do some research on it, and create a blog post to teach your classmates about it. Here's the catch: your Big Blog no. 1 needs to be on a genre (or sub-genre) of American Roots Music. One of the unique aspects of American-born musics is that they inevitably well up from the bottom rungs of society before spreading across the globe. As we'll discuss, the Blues were born from the very poorest of Southern American society and, by birthing such genres as Rock, Country, and R&B, have basically conquered the world. This, in essence, is what American Roots music is--kinds of music that were born on American soil, musics that are almost always syncretic nature and initially connected to underprivileged communities.  So, first, select your speci...

 Time for another Cool Stuff Blog! This time, we're going to Africa. A few quick parameters for  this week's blog topics: All the rules from the last Cool Stuff blog are still in play--three separate lines of inquiry, two of which must be explicitly about a musical topic; each item needs to include a  hefty  paragraph (at the very least) of description/explanation; you need to let me know where you got your information from Scope: You may go anywhere in Africa for your topics as long as you are  South of the Sahara Desert.  If you're just dying to dive into, say, Morocco or Egypt, don't worry--we'll consider those places when we get to Arabic music in a few weeks. More Scope: Try to go beyond what we talk about in class. If you're just dying to explore further the tradition of the griot, or South Africa Isicathamiya, try to post new significantly new information, or present the topic from a different point of view. Yet More Scope: You can consider any music...

Time for more Cool Stuff! This time, we'll be traveling to South America. Yes, our focus there has been mainly in the Central Andes, but for purposes of this blog I'm opening it up to all of South America. (Note: for this assignment, we're keeping to  South  America, rather than  Latin  America. South America is just the continent, and the northernmost point is southern Panama. You'll have the opportunity to explore the music of Central America, Mexico, or the Caribbean later on in the course, if you wish.) A few gentle reminders. You Cool Stuff blogs should include: Three separate lines of inquiry--things you want to know more about. These can stem from our class discussions or readings or from other areas of your knowledge. Only one of those lines may be about the culture in general. At least two of the lines of inquiry must have some connection to  music . Each line of inquiry must be accompanied by a hefty paragraph of info from you.  You need to indica...

  While we’re together in class, the bulk of our discussions will involve cultures that are probably not the main personal touch-point for most of you in our class. So for a few of our blog posts, we’ll take the light of observation and shine it back on our own, personal cultures. Just as we’ve spent some time discussing how music and religion are interconnected in various Native American cultures, for your next blog post you should shine that light back on your own culture to explore connections between religion and music in your own backyard, so to speak. When we discuss the connection between music and religion in any given culture, we tend to cover two basic areas— use  and  aesthetics.  For instance, many Native American groups  use  a good amount of music in their religious ceremonies and teaching. Song creation is attributed to the Deities, and performers will sometimes sing the part of those Deities (Yeibichai) in their ceremonies. To...