Graduate Courses 2024-2025

MUSIC 567 SEM B1: Area Studies in Ethnomusicology: India and South Asia

Winter 2025: Monday & Wednesday, 9:30 AM – 10:50 AM
Instructor: Dr. Julia Byl

This course takes India and South Asia not as a geographical marker, but as a larger set of connected ideas–musical, religious, and cultural. We will think about diverse music from the region (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Tibet, to name a few places) connected to lived practices of the land–including a consideration of regional practices in India, literary developments in Sanskrit and Urdu, the great Hindu epics, and the development of the Karnatak and Hindustani classical traditions. But we will also think of South Asian music broadly–as it moves across language groups, cultural areas and religion. South Asian music crosses the Indian Ocean to Kenya, and on to Trinidad, Fiji, and Indonesia. We will also pay attention to the development of national identities through Bollywood, and to the Indian diaspora in Canada–including Edmonton. Students will do research on these topics and many others, bringing their research worlds into the content of the course.

MUSIC 568 SEM B1: Area Studies in Ethnomusicology: The Arab World

Winter 2025: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00 PM – 3:20 PM
Instructor: Dr. Michael Frishkopf

This course will survey music cultures and trends in the Arab world (broadly defined), from the 7th century to the present. We will develop a critical perspective, by contextualizing music designated as "Arab" within Arab nationalism from the 19th century onwards. Likewise, the concept of "Arab world" will be problematized, nuanced, and extended to the diasporic community. Historical and music theoretical approaches will be adopted, but the course will focus on the sociology and anthropology of music. We will examine localized musical dialects--urban and rural—characterizing societies and cultures from Morocco to the Gulf, as well as broader mediated forms, and music media themselves, from phonodiscs to satellite TV. Aesthetics of music, spiritual, religious, and metaphysical dimensions, gender and sexuality, politics, coloniality, and globalization, as well as music theory, are all topics to be taken up. A significant component of the course is sensory-immersive - listening and viewing and even performing, including a number of music-related films, both documentary and feature. The objective is for you to learn about these multifaceted music cultures, and, through them (and by means of their critical analysis) to begin to understand the Arab world (so frequently misunderstood) in a new way.

MUSIC 577 SEM B1: Advanced Topics in Musicology: Editing Music

Winter 2025: Friday, 9:00 AM – 11:50 AM
Instructor: Dr. Fabio Morabito

What does it mean to prepare an edition of music (that is, of music that exists already in some form elsewhere)? How does one do it? And why? Such initial questions prompt even bigger, more foundational ones: what is a musical text or, indeed, what could it be? What is the role of a composer in handling it, compared to that of a musicologist preparing an edition, or that of a performer? Approximately half of the course takes the format of a seminar: a directed, focused debate based on readings, to consider several answers to these questions. 

European-colonial musicology started off, one might sum up, with monumental projects making available the music of selected Western composers in critical (or scholarly) editions. But creating such monuments in print meant also marginalizing musics that this particular tradition of scholarship deemed unfit for, or unworthy of, a scholarly edition. So the other half of the course takes the format of an “edition lab” in which each of us will be preparing an edition and receiving regular feedback in dedicated workshop sessions. The lab will be an opportunity to reflect on how, in practice, we might remediate past historical erasures, and work with music more inclusively and sustainably. 

MUSIC 588 SEM B1: Studies in Music and Media: Popular Music and Streaming Media

Winter 2025: Wednesday, 1:00 PM – 3:50 PM
Instructor: Dr. Brian Fauteux

In Music 488/588, we will investigate the multiple ways that streaming media technology has altered music and culture over the past few decades. In the streaming media era, music has become increasingly ubiquitous, accessible, ephemeral, and, arguably, devalued. At the same time, streaming media has disrupted the chart dominance of radio friendly hits and seen the rise and chart success of hip hop artists, Spanish-speaking superstars, and music styles from around the world. In this seminar, we will look at the ways that our relationship with music has changed as streaming media moves from being an imperfect feature of the early internet to the dominant mode of music listening today. 

Topics we will cover in close detail include: musician and fan labour, questions around the value of music on streaming services, debates around the role of copyright in the music industries, record label and Big Tech industry concentration, the ways that more traditional music media like the radio and television have adapted (or not) in the streaming era, the growth of social media platforms for circulating new and old music, and the ways we might imagine a more viable future for working musicians. 

This course is designed for both upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in Music, or those students in other departments with an interest in popular music and media. It is also approved as a 400-level elective course for Media Studies majors.