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About the content
Learn the ideas and vocabulary for listening to world music, and examine the music of several world music cultures and how they have entered into mainstream popular culture.
Syllabus
- Week One: Introductions with an overview of recording technology history and ties to world music and cultures; vocabulary for talking about world music and global cultural encounters, and a case study of “Chant,” the 1990s Gregorian chant recording that crossed over into the popular music market.
- Week Two: Graceland, Paul Simon's "collaborative" album. We reflect on the two opposite meanings of the word "appropriate," examine multitrack recording, and consider the "collaborative" process in world music production.
- Week Three: Tuvan Throat Singers, we examine how nomadic pastoralists from the Russian republic called Tanna Tuva have become world music superstars because of a single field recording made by an ethnomusicologist in the late 1980s.
- Week Four: Pygmy Pop? We discuss "pygmies" in the western imagination, and uses of "pygmy" music in northern hemisphere popular culture to ask about the ethics of recorded music appropriations.
- Week Five: Australian Aboriginal group Yothu Yindi embraced a discourse of cultural and musical reconciliation, and mixed the language of rock with traditional sounds as a successful political strategy in the 1990s.
- Week Six: Kalahari Bushmen or Khoisan, are perhaps the oldest existing human communities. We discuss their traditional music, the 1970s Gods Must Be Crazy commercial film, and appropriation and reclamation of Khoisan heritage by South Africans in post-apartheid South Africa.
- Week Seven: Cuba, the 1990s Buena Vista Social Club sound recording and documentary film, and a brief discussion of Cuban contemporary history and music are the subject of this final class.
Instructors
- Carol Muller - Music
Content Designer
The University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as Penn), founded in 1740, is a private university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. A member of the Ivy League, Penn is the fourth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and considers itself the first university in the United States to offer both undergraduate and graduate degrees.
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