Music and Colonialism 

音樂與殖民主義

Instructor：Jen-yen Chen

Semester：Fall 2007

Credit：3

Fall 2007, Thursdays, 2:20-5:20pm

Office Hours：Monday 1-3pm, R109

Course description: 

This course investigates the relationship between colonialism and music’s styles, practices, and ideologies. It will examine the encounters between widely divergent peoples as a tragic experience for the colonized but also as a positive resource for cultural development. Among the topics to be considered are cultural hegemony and assimilation, ideologies of canon, exoticism and Othering, and reflections of colonialist attitudes in scholarly practices.

Prerequisites:  

The ability to read music notation and a knowledge of basic concepts of music theory (e.g. key, tonic, tripartite form) are necessary in order to comprehend the musical analyses that will form a part of the course.

Course Requirements

Class meetings will focus on discussions of assigned readings. These will be drawn from the list below. A short response paper (approximately one page) on each week’s reading must be submitted during the class meeting for that week.

In addition, there will be a semester project, on a related topic of your choice, which will culminate in a final presentation and paper.

Overall grades will be calculated as follows:

Class participation (attendance, contribution to discussions, response papers)      50%

Semester project (presentation and paper of 10-12 pages)                                     50%

Preliminary Reading List

Bhabha, Homi.  The Location of Culture.

Head, Matthew.  Orientalism, Masquerade, and Mozart’s Turkish Music.

Kartomi, Margaret and Blum, Stephen.  Music-Cultures in Contact:  Convergences and Collisons.

Mittler, Barbara.  Dangerous Tunes:  The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China Since 1949.

Nettl, Bruno.  The Western Impact on World Music:  Change, Adaptation, and Survival.

Said, Edward.  Orientalism.

Weber, William.  The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England:  A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology.

Witzleben, John Lawrence.  “Whose Ethnomusicology?  Western Ethnomusicology and the Study of Asian Music,” Ethnomusicology xli (1997).