Music and Communication
Clst/Mus 2494: Fall 2003
Tuesdays 10-12:20pm, 302 Music Bldg

Jonathan Sterne, Department of Communication
Andrew Weintraub, School of Music

This class explores the centrality of communication and media to contemporary musical practice and experience, and the centrality of music to modern forms of communication and media. Over the past decade, there has been growing interest among scholars of music in questions of communication. This can be seen in the turn toward media studies among some ethnomusicologists, and the "cultural turn" in the New Musicology. At the same time, communication scholars have continued to struggle with the question of music as a type of communication that does not easily conform to linguistic or sender-receiver models of communication. Music also cuts across the standard categories of media studies and often falls through its cracks. Among some communication scholars, music remains a denigrated object despite its centrality both to the experience of modern life and the vast industrial and technological complex of the mass media.

Music and Communication is a team-taught, interdisciplinary graduate-level seminar on cultural studies approaches to music and communication. The course is organized around key issues and concepts in this emerging interdisciplinary field, and students will be exposed to important contemporary scholarship from a variety of theoretical, political and disciplinary perspectives.

.pdf syllabus here