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.

This seminar critically overviews the intellectual genealogies of what are now called popular music studies, popular musicology, etc., and attempts to contemplate the dialectical relationship between the socio-culture dimensions of music and the musical dimensions of society and culture. This seminar consists of the three major parts. Part one deals with key concepts and definitions surrounding the very notion of popular music and with the interdisciplinary origins and intellectual trajectories of the study of popular music. Part II and Part III are both concerned with diverse theoretical positions regarding the inter-relatedness between musical text and soocio-cultural context, with an analytical and critical stress on studying popular music in/as/through culture and society and on studying culture and society in/as/through popular music respectively.

This course offers an introduction to the life and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91). It examines the nature of his musical style through in-depth discussions of a selection of his masterworks and also considers the relationship of this style to his biography and to his cultural and social environments. 

This course examines and teaches how to play popular guitar styles that have had widespread impact over the past century, including blues, rock and global folk styles.