MUS 201-02 - Topics in Music & Culture: Music in Religious Experience (Fall)

4 credits (Fall)

This course explores the numerous roles that music plays in various religious, spiritual, and cosmological contexts around the world. During the course of the semester, students will explore how music shapes, informs, and maintains normative social and epistemological orders in disparate religious practices. Students will examine the role music plays in ritual experience and its role in triggering altered states of consciousness such as trance, spirit possession, and ecstasy. The course will also address the ways in which anthropology, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines have approached the relationship between music and the divine in human experience.

Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Perman