Music is everywhere. In churches and bars, at festivals and funerals, from concert halls to mini-malls, music is nearly ubiquitous. It's both international big business and freely available on the internet. Often ignored or in the background, music plays a necessary role – but what is its role? People display their identities with it, keep to themselves through it, idolize performers of it, get quite emotional about it. And don't forget dance and song and film and TV commercials and all the other places music plays a supporting role. So widely dispersed and so important to people, yet it's one of the first things to be cut from schools during tight economic times as one of the 'luxury items' we don't really need. In all cultures, from the beginning of human association, music has played some part. Now it's global industry and globally shared peer-to-peer. How can music be in so many places and yet still seen as unimportant?  

In this course we will investigate some of the many layers of musical culture as it intersects with daily life and global communications. To do this, we will need the help of various social sciences, the humanities, and allied arts such as literature and poetry.  Since we are embedded in American culture, we will first look at ourselves from an Americanist perspective, considering popular culture and the so called 'high' culture venues of music. Later in class we will see how the critical questions we might ask here and of ourselves can apply in an international, ethnic, and global context of music in society. We will also consider how to work carefully at the intersections of economics, social policy, communications, and artistic interpretation. 

This is not a music theory class, but we will develop ways to talk about music by considering our own music talking, looking at how people talk to each other about music, asking musicians to talk about music, and reading musicologists (and others) who talk about music from various perspectives. We will want to think about the musician's language and musicologist's terminology, but we'll pay equally close attention to our own language, to the languages of other listeners, and to various social science and humanist theorizers. The field of ethnomusicology has championed this kind of multidimensional perspective on music, but it, too, is challenged by the new mixtures enabled by global music sharing and the internet – so, even though this is an introductory class, we have the opportunity to map uncharted territories and the possibility of discovering something new.