Course Bio

This paper focuses on a central question: How does music come to mean in contemporary societies? In seeking to answer this question, we will explore a wide range of musical practices, from Inuit throat-singing to Japanese noise music, and engage a decidedly interdisciplinary methodology, drawing on musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular music and sound studies, alongside phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, to name but a few.

A guiding notion throughout the course is that music is not an absolute category but rather is shaped and inflected by listening – in short, we will be listening with contemporary societies. If, as we shall come to understand, listening is never a neutral practice, then what institutions of power, overt or otherwise, come to shape our listening practices and the sonic objects to which they attend? More still, how could listening be used as a way to think otherwise, and how might musical practices reframe and contest dominant institutional narratives? In answering these questions, we hope to destabilise our previously held notions of what listening, music, and sound might be through close attention to varied conceptions of sonic practice across the world’s contemporary landscape.

Our studies will take us from the nightclubs of New York to the torture camps of Guantanamo Bay, from issues of ontology and epistemology to ones of selfhood and identity, and from music as contained by instruments and scores to sound unfettered from all signifying constraints. Throughout all these endeavours, our central question remains the same: How could this thing we call ‘music’ ever come to mean quite so much?