MUS 322-01 - Advanced Studies in Music: Performing the Sacred

4 credits (Spring)

Music is often central to the ways in which communities connect with the sacred and encounter spirits, gods, and the divine. Ritual spaces are often transformative one in which people’s very understanding of reality can be permanently altered. This course examines how music, sound, and movement connect the living to the divine, the spiritual, and the dead throughout the world. We ask how music allows people to transcend the mundane and cross thresholds that test ideas of belief, death, and the supernatural. Students will explore how music informs, alters, and maintains normative social and epistemological orders in disparate religious contexts, reflect on the nature of ritual cross-culturally, and consider music’s role in facilitating altered states of consciousness such as trance, spirit possession, and ecstasy that can change people’s very understanding the cosmos. This discussion will be framed by a critical reflection on the role of secular modernism in academic disciplines from decolonial perspectives.

Prerequisite: Second-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Perman