Diverse Cultures and their Musics January 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 to...

 Final Cool Stuff Blog of the semester! Same ground rules apply here as in all the Cool Stuff blogs: 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. And, obviously, you can choose from any where in the Arabic and/or Indian world. Here is my (just one line of inquiry) contribution. As we've gone through the world of Arabic music, you've heard me make reference a couple of times to Tariq Jundi. He's the oud player whose music we listened to in class, and he's truly a force of nature in the music scene of Jordan. He's also a great teacher--the Arabic music theory lesson I had with him was just a little over an hour long, but it was priceless in terms of my understanding of Arabic music. I do try to keep up with what he's doing over time, and not too long ago I found this w...

  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. In Dr. Mr. Vaneman's lecture about the blues, he pointed out that 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 he showed, the blues were born from the very poorest of Southern American society and, by birthing such genres as Rock, Country, and R&B, has 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 underpri...

  Time for another Cool Stuff Blog! This time, we're going to both 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: You can consider any music of sub-Saharan Africa that you like. It can be traditional, modern, vocal, instrumental, formal, informal, and from any part of sub-Saharan Africa that you like. Wondering what goes on in Madagascar? Go find out! Wondering if they have any ...

 For our next blog posts, we're returning to having you look at the music of your own music-culture. The idea here is to take the lens of ethnomusicology and shine it back in your general direction. There are no right or wrong answers here, just honest observation. In an effort to not overwhelm you with too  many blog posts, I'm letting you pick the direction you'd like to go here--you can discuss how either music and religion or music and gender intersects in your own musical experiences. We've found ourselves noticing both of those relationships in the cultures we've studied, and we'll be noticing them even more as the semester progresses.  If you choose Music & Religion: Think about how music and religion intersect in your own experience by considering both use  and aesthetics. For instance, many Native American groups use   a good amount of music in their religious ceremonies and teaching. Too, their songs are an important means of transmitting reli...

A number of our blog posts this semester are going to fall under the heading of "Cool Stuff!" For all of these blog posts, you're going to research further into the music-cultures that we're studying. Your job is to think of three things that you'd like to know more about concerning that music-culture---perhaps you want to know more about one of the instruments, or a different instrument, or you'd like to delve further into some of the dances, or into a particular musical genre, or there's a certain performer that you've liked and you'd like to know more about that performer, or find another performer in that same vein. Or perhaps you just have a question that you'd like to explore. Roam the web and find out more about those three things, and then post what you find here. As with all of your blogs, you'll want to post your findings in such a way that we can explore them fully: videos are great, as are links to whole websites. Pictures can a...