Musical Ethnographies

Graduate / Professional

Ethnography refers to two things: (1) a research methodology and (2) the resulting text that is written as the published result of this methodology. In this course, we explore a selection of musical ethnographies (texts) that have been written in the past few decades. These are monographs in which scholars center their research on musical performance. These monographs are argumentative and hail from fields in which ethnography is a central research methodology, such as ethnomusicology, anthropology, performance studies, and regional/topical disciplines like South Asian studies, Black studies, etc. Each week focuses on one monograph. Undergraduate students are responsible for reading a considerable selection of the book, while graduate students are expected to have read the entire text before attending class. As the course progresses, students familiarize themselves with various approaches to both field research and the long-form prose that is the ethnographic result. Students also conduct their own ethnographic research to produce ethnographic prose. Key terms used throughout the course include fieldwork, participant observation, viscerality, embodiment, transcription, and various analytics for performance. Th 9:25am-11:20am