Subject Area: Music

This course examines the nature of music as “tradition”, investigating discourses, values and uses of music that endure or change at a different rate and in different ways from musical forms themselves. Examining the development of one or more musical cultures, the course will demonstrate how genres, works and performances embody and generate meaning through their relationship to community in specific historical, social, and political contexts. Affect and aesthetics, creativity and cognition, embodiment and memory, reception and transmission, and performance and ritual are some of the possible themes that enter the examination of how music-community relationships and interrelated meanings are retained or modified in the contexts of modernisation, globalisation and migration. The course investigates how and why, as new forms are developed, some become an enduring feature of a musical culture, while others are used, valued, then ‘trashed’ as redundant.