Diverse Cultures and their Musics Fall 2020

 Time for another Cool Stuff Blog! This time, we're going to Africa. A few quick parameters for  this week's blog topics: All the rules from the last Cool Stuff blog are still in play--three separate lines of inquiry, two of which must be explicitly about a musical topic; each item needs to include a hefty  paragraph (at the very least) of description/explanation; you need to let me know where you got your information from Scope: You may go anywhere in Africa for your topics as long as you are South of the Sahara Desert. If you're just dying to dive into, say, Morocco or Egypt, don't worry--we'll consider those places when we get to Arabic music in a few weeks. More Scope: You can consider any music of sub-Saharan Africa that you like. It can be traditional, modern, vocal, instrumental, formal, informal, and from any part of sub-Saharan Africa that you like. Wondering what goes on in Madagascar? Go find out! Wondering if they have any aerophones? Go find out! Want t...

  As we’ve already begun to notice, participation in music and the related arts is often proscribed by the gender of the potential participator. For instance, we've noticed that drumming in Native American music has traditionally been performed by men, but in recent years women--especially younger women--have begun to drum as well. And, though we didn't talk about it much, I've never seen a video of a traditional Andean harpist who is female--though we did see several female singers. We'll observe more of these disparities as we go on.  For your Music and Gender Blog, I want you all to muse on how music and gender have intersected in your own musical experiences. Have different genders listened to different types of music, or been expected   to listen to different types of music? Within the style of music that you like to listen to, does the media treat different genders differently? If you've had experience in any sort of music ensembles yourself, have you noticed ...

  Time for more Cool Stuff! This time, we'll be traveling to South America. Yes, our focus there has been mainly in the Central Andes, but for purposes of this blog I'm opening it up to all of South America. (Note: for this assignment, we're keeping to South  America, rather than Latin  America. South America is just the continent, and the northernmost point is southern Panama. You'll have the opportunity to explore the music of Central America, Mexico, or the Caribbean later on in the course, if you wish.) A few gentle reminders. You Cool Stuff blogs should include: Three separate lines of inquiry--things you want to know more about. These can stem from our class discussions or readings or from other areas of your knowledge. Only one of those lines may be about the culture in general. At least two of the lines of inquiry must have some connection to music . Each line of inquiry must be accompanied by a hefty paragraph of info from you.  You need to indicate where yo...

  While we’re together in class, the bulk of our discussions will involve cultures that are probably not the main personal touch-point for most of you in our class. So for a few of our blog posts, we’ll take the light of observation and shine it back on our own, personal cultures. Just as we’ve spent some time discussing how music and religion are interconnected in various Native American cultures, for your next blog post you should shine that light back on your own culture to explore connections between religion and music in your own backyard, so to speak. When we discuss the connection between music and religion in any given culture, we tend to cover two basic areas— use  and  aesthetics.  For instance, many Native American groups  use  a good amount of music in their religious ceremonies and teaching. Song creation is attributed to the Deities, and performers will sometimes sing the part of those Deities (Yeibichai) in their ceremonies. To...