MUS 201-02 - Topics in Music and Culture: Music, Capitalism, and Consumption (Spring)

4 credits (Spring)

Particularly since the rise of Romantic aesthetic philosophy and ideology during the late 18th century, high art has been discursively positioned as diametrically oppositional to commercial concerns. In large part because of this discursive opposition, however, the course, we will examine the ways in which music and musicians operated along side, within, and against the capitalist system of commercial categories of art and commerce have interacted in complex and intriguing ways. In this exchange. We will consider the trajectory of the art-commerce dialectic from the 1760s to the present, and discuss its manifestations in what is commonly called the Western culture of consumption.

Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Staff