Topics in Music and Culture

Each Topics in Music and Culture course — also known as Music 201 — provides a detailed study of the relationship between music and a particular aspect of culture, such as ritual, language, technology, politics, gender, or mythology. 

This fall, the topics include:

Music and Mind: an exploration of the rapidly growing field of music perception and cognition. Topics covered include evolutionary origins of music, music and emotion, musical learning and development, music and the brain, the perception and cognition of music structure, and the processes involved in composition, improvisation, and performance. Taught by Jee-Weon Cha.

Music in Religious Experience: an exploration of the numerous roles that music plays in various religious, spiritual, and cosmological contexts around the world. Students explore music and normative social and epistemological orders in religious practices; examine music in ritual experience and altered states of consciousness; and address the ways in which anthropology, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines have approached the relationship between music and the divine in human experience. Taught by Anthony Perman.