Subject is called Music of the world (history subject)

Around 1750 words excluding references

Original Question Below:

Your essay MUST include reference to your listening as an integral part of your essay argument.

CHOOSE ONE TOPIC:

1. “The way people understand and appreciate music, what they find beautiful or ugly, mellifluous or cacophonous, is a product of culture, not something universal.” (Timothy Rice, 2004, Music in Bulgaria, p.32).

Discuss this comment in relation to one or more of the musics of the world studied in this subject.

2. “[The] ability to freely change and invent new meanings for music is an important source of its cultural, social and political power.” (Timothy Rice, 2004, Music in Bulgaria, p.85).

Discuss this comment in relation to one or more of the musics of the world studied in this subject.

3. In a 1990 article, Appadurai comments that we have moved into “a new global cultural economy – a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models.� (Arjun Appadurai, 1990, �Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy�, Public Culture, 2 (2): pp. 1-24).

Discuss how music is implicated in the “new global cultural economy.” In particular relate your discussion to one or more musics of the world studied in this subject.

4. �Believing �that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning”. (Clifford Geertz, 1973, �Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture”, p. 5, in The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Hutchison, pp. 3-32 ).

Discuss Geertz�s famous statement in relation to what you have learned about music in this subject.

5. �Instead of treating non-Western societies as cultures from which data can be collected to support Western theories of cosmic order, fieldworkers [in ethnomusicology] recognise the different and equally valid worldviews held by different societies.� (Barz and Cooley, “Casting shadows: Fieldwork is dead! Long live fieldwork!”, in Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley, eds., Shadows in the Field. New perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977,p.11).

Describe and compare some of the ways different worldviews are manifested in two music systems.

6. World music is “enhanced Western primitivist fantasy and voyeurism, allowing a listener to enjoy an hour of yuppie green politics, or audio-leisure tourism, perhaps even while feeling righteous about wealth trickle-down.” (Steven Feld, 1992, �Voices of the rainforest: Politics of music�, Arena 99/100, p. 175).

Discuss this statement in relation to the commodification of non-western musics by western musicians, composers and recording companies.

7. Compare the uses and functions of music in a society other than your own with the uses and functions of music in your home country. Include a discussion of how musical expression reflects and reinforces social realities.

8. Describe how music embodies diverse identities, with reference to at least two of the following: nationality, region, ethnicity, race, class, religion, age and gender.

9. �The fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, not in musical works�but in action, in what people do. It is only by understanding what people do as they take part in a musical act that we can hope to understand its nature and the function it fulfills in human life.� (Christopher Small, “Prelude. Music and musicking”, Musicking. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, p. 8).

Discuss Small�s opinion drawing on your reading and listening for this subject.

10. �If music systems are studied in isolation apart from the cultural environment in which they are supported and to which they lend support, a great deal of the meaning of the music is certain to be obscured. Musical thought is indivisible from the thought processes and cultural concepts of the people who produce the music and the people for whom it is played.� (Judith Becker, 1979, �Time and Tune in Java�, in A.L. Becker and Aram Yengoyan, eds. The Imagination of reality. Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems. Norwood N.J: Ablex, pp. 197-210).

Discuss this statement drawing on your reading and listening for this subject.

If you require references from my weekly reading please feel free to ask.

 

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