MUS4572

This course provides a basic introduction to analyzing popular songs, primarily those within the Anglo-American tradition. Although the course focuses directly on the musical details, techniques, and forms pertaining to popular songs, larger questions of meaning and interpretation, production, sound and instrumentation, history of musical style and genre and historical periodization, important individual performers/songwriters and artistic formations, marketing and sociology, and globalization will not be ignored, but they will be most often pursued in the context of analyzing specific songs and recordings. Like any viable form of music, popular music is also a living practice, and hence our engagement with popular music will also require us to be in contact with practitioners of popular music here in the Twin Cities. Finally, the course will require students to engage with popular music in a number of ways: transcription, analysis, aural skills, ethnography (of a modest sort), composition, performance, and expository writing. The class is in part organized around basic parameters as explored in rock/pop music (form, timbre, harmony, rhythm, etc.) and otherwise around selected focused topics of study (individual artists or genres, specific research questions, etc.).

prereq: undergraduate- MUS 1502 and MUS 1512 with grade of at least C- or higher
graduate- MUS 3508 and MUS 3518 with grade of at least C- or higher, or passing score on tonal entrance exams.

010683