The Theater of Musical Performance

Taking approaches from performance studies, media studies, historical musicology, and cultural studies, this course seeks to discover aspects of musical ritual, audience experience, and identity construction that have become transparent or normalized by their familiarity. We will explore the visual and theatrical dimensions of music performances through analysis of live performances, video clips, photographs, and other historical documents such as oral histories and criticism. After an initial two weeks of focused theoretical reading, students will launch research projects based on genres and artists of their own choice and give periodic updates on their research progress. The regular syllabus concentrates on the kinds of music that have received the most extensive and insightful scholarly treatment, and on readings by scholars such as Philip Auslander, Fabian Holt, Daphne Brooks, and Martha Feldman who have probed questions of musical performance most ambitiously.