MUSI462

In her book, MUSIC IN EVERYDAY LIFE (2000), the British sociologist of music, Tia DeNora, notes that "music serves as a kind of template against which feeling, perception, representation, and social situation are created and sustained," later calling it "a building material of self-identity" and "the cultural material par excellence of emotion and the personal." This course examines some of the many ways that music acts within individual, social and cultural life as a powerful part of the search for, and construction of, identity and meaning. In the process we explore a wide range of music; use different forms of inquiry, observation, documentation, ethnography, analysis, interpretation, response; and draw particularly upon the backgrounds and experiences of the members of the class.