MUS 322-01 - Advanced Studies in Music: Music and Capitalism

4 credits (Spring)

Particularly since the 18th Century, North Americans and Europeans have come to imagine that “art” stands in necessary opposition to “commerce.” If you produce art for money, you’re compromising your ideas; you’re “inauthentic;” you’re a “sell-out;” or worse. In large part because of this discursive opposition, however, the categories of art and commerce have interacted in complex and intriguing ways. In this course, we will examine the ways in which music and musicians operated along side, within, and against the capitalist system of commercial exchange. Drawing on examples from the 1600s to the present, from Josquin des Prez and Ludwig van Beethoven to Jay-Z and Nickleback, we will put the art-commerce dialectic in historical context and discuss its manifestations in the 21st century incarnation of capitalism and the global culture of consumption.

Prerequisite: MUS 112.
Instructor: Laver