Music in World Cultures
An exploration of the world’s traditional, popular and contemporary musics in their cultural context. (No prior musical knowledge required.)
In every culture people perform, compose and listen to music in a variety of ways and for different reasons. MUSI 104 encourages students to develop a broad knowledge of musics and an understanding of their various uses and functions. In addition to lectures and tutorials, students gain important insights into various musics by learning to play a variety of musical instruments (eg Indonesian gamelan, Japanese taiko, African djembe, Hawaiian ukulele, Māori taonga pūoro). This paper explores some of the world’s musics in their cultural context and aims to generate awareness of and respect for music from a wide range of cultures. Case studies of particular music cultures can include Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, Asia, Oceania and Europe.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this paper, you will be able to demonstrate that you can:
- Play at least one musical instrument from each of the following places: Africa, Japan, Indonesia and Aotearoa/New Zealand
- Aurally recognise stylistic characteristics and instruments of musics introduced in MUSI 104
- Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of ideas from scholarly literature
- Apply ideas from scholarly literature to real-life musical examples
- Reflexively evaluate your own learning
- Locate, retrieve and effectively use scholarly literature
- Effectively communicate in writing
- Understand and appreciate how select cultures perform, perceive and conceptualise music