MUSI2671: Studies in Popular Music

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• Through critical study of diverse popular musical genres, styles, and artists, students will gain a well-informed understanding of popular music studies, covering a variety of issues in musical form and style as well as in popular musics relation to society in a variety of cultural contexts. At the same time, students will formulate their own well-reasoned opinions regarding the effectiveness and limitations of existing approaches to researching popular music.

• The course is organised thematically, with each lecture, seminar, and assignment focussing on specific research areas that are well-represented in popular music studies. The following are examples of the kind of issues that may be covered: form in Anglo-American popular music, music and subcultural style, recording technologies and mediation, sampling, music and the moving image, the music business, the performance of gender and sexual identity, the Black Atlantic, World Music, and music in Diasporic communities. Examples of styles that may be discussed include: rock, blues, music hall, rap, heavy metal, outsider music, and popular music from non-Western countries. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to interpret critically the textual and musical content of diverse examples, relating musical features to other forms of cultural expression (in literature and film for example), and, crucially, questioning the interpretations and methodologies proposed in scholarship. In addition to identifying defining formal and stylistic features of a diverse selection of popular music genres, students are encouraged to isolate the ways in which artists use music to affirm or challenge values, reinforce or blur category boundaries, and precisely communicate individual and group identities. Following on from this, students are invited to question the application and meanings of genre labels and colloquial classificatory terms such as folk, pop and classical. Finally, in assessments and presentations, students critically test research theories and methods by applying them to their own choices of genre, artist, or song ideally also incorporating their own original research into listeners responses.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students should acquire broad knowledge about diverse popular music forms, deeper knowledge about several focal forms, and working knowledge of theories and methods proposed within the academic field of popular music studies.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students should learn how to appraise existing scholarship in the field of popular music studies, critically interpret popular music recordings, and convincingly identify links between the two. They should also develop the ability to locate their own research projects within this framework.

Key Skills:

• The module will establish and embed a critical approach to the study of popular music, while developing practical skills in analysing and commenting critically on a wide variety of music.

• This course will involve a combination of lectures and seminars, delivered in the first term. Complex ideas, essential historical and cultural background, key dates and influential figures will be introduced in the lectures, which will also incorporate time for group discussion. In the seminars, which will be interspersed throughout, students will have a chance to discuss set readings and musical examples relating to the previous lecture thereby continuously consolidating and refining ideas as the course progresses. The assignments then go on to encourage the students to apply these ideas to musical forms of their own choice, promoting a deeper working knowledge of popular music.

Short written assignments involving musical analysis and commentary and/or seminar presentations, serving as preparation for summative assignment.

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