Current Perspectives in Popular Music Studies

7.5 credits

Course, Master's level, 5MU078

Spring 2024 Spring 2024, Uppsala, 50%, On-campus, English

About the course

From its beginnings, the study of pop music has been marked by two idiosyncratic characteristics: first, it has been intrinsically interdisciplinary, including a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Second, the field of study has been ever-current, deeply invested in analysing cultural practices as they unfold as well as situating these analyses in their political, economic, and technological contexts. Building on this tradition, this course will introduce some of the central contemporary perspectives in the study of popular music and will be structured around three primary areas of examination:

  1. Analysis: This theme engages in contemporary approaches towards the analysis of pop music with regard to its particularities as a heavily technologised, mediated, and non-notated musical practice. 
  2. Theory: This theme introduces contemporary interdisciplinary work that has contributed to the theorization of popular music, its performances, aesthetics, and possible meanings from a range of scholarly perspectives including philosophy, gender and critical race studies as well as ecocriticism. 
  3. Current sounds: This theme focuses on recent aesthetic developments in popular music with a focus on its sonic, technological, and multi-media characteristics and maps some of the novel scholarly questions these developments have introduced.

FOLLOW UPPSALA UNIVERSITY ON

facebook
instagram
twitter
youtube
linkedin