Music and the Imagination

4 credits · Graduate

This seminar explores the techniques of imaginative processes through which humans design alternative narratives, histories, futures, and subjectivities. Focusing on the musical and sonic, we examine how the musical imagination relates to other social and cultural processes by which we imagine culture into being. After a brief investigation of the anthropology of the imagination, we turn to the process of imagining the historical past; urban nostalgias and immigrant cultures; transnational and diasporic imaginaries; and the dystopian imagination in music. We consider how and why music participates in the social life of romanticism and fantasy, and how these roles inform conceptions of music’s importance to and place in society.