Diverse Cultures and their Musics Spring 2021

 The time is here--our last Blog entries! We'll talk more about this next week, but I'd like to start out by thanking you for being such a wonderful class this term. Your curiosity in your blogs, your kindness to each other in the comments, and your honesty in the "quizzes" has been one of the Good Things that has helped me navigate this most curious year.  This last blog is (obviously) a Big Blog, and the scope (but not the content) will be the same as the first Big Blog. In fact, let's just copy them here:  In terms of scope, think of this as a short term paper, but more informal, and with a fair amount of media embedded. As a guidepost, aim for about 1000 words, plus media. You'll need a handful of sources at the end (use full citations, rather than just web addresses), but you don't need to include footnotes or parenthetical references....While a bit of fan-girling is just fine, do remember that you're teaching other people about your chosen topic,...

  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...