Music

Korea began to adopt Western culture in the nineteenth century and developed their own hybridized music culture into the twentieth-first century. This class examines contemporary Korean musical culture alongside the history of Korea and explores Korean music culture as a global phenomenon. The course covers Korean aesthetic and sensibility in Korean musical culture with select examples from Korean traditional music, Korean’s children music, Korean arts songs of the Colonial Korea period, popular music (K-pop), Korean drama music, Korean film music, and K-classical music.

The course examines popular music, not as isolated artistic texts, but situated within a wider context. The course is organized around the historical survey of popular music in modern Korea. It looks at and listens to a variety of musical genres and styles that emerged and developed in modern Korea from yuhaengga in the colonial era up until k-pop today, by situating them within a wider socio-cultural, political-economic context, as well as in relation to global musical trends.

This course examines jazz music and its connections to both African-American culture and global social-historical contexts. It covers the development of jazz in the United States, surveying the rise of the music as an African-American art form over the course of the twentieth century, with attention to blues, ragtime, swing, bebop, modal jazz, free jazz, and fusion; and jazz as a transnationally circulating cultural form that is both a product of and a contributor to globalizing trends, examining jazz’s circulations and permutations in contexts ranging from 1930s Shanghai to present-day West Africa.

This course examines the range of ways in which words are used to describe music. It covers music history, analysis, ethnomusicology, journalism, program notes, blogs, educational texts, and grant applications.

This course provides an introduction to jazz music and its history. Assigned readings focus on the music’s history; lectures attempt to bring that history to life, using examples from a wide range of sound recordings and film footage. The course devotes particular attention to the complex dynamic between change and continuity as the music developed over the course of the twentieth century, but also explores how jazz influenced and interacted with other musical forms. Although the emphasis will be on American jazz, the course will also consider jazz produced in other cultural contexts, including Japan.

This course involves reading and discussion of works of classical music and performance on classic guitar under the professor's supervision.