Graduate Courses

Times and locations of courses are published in the Public Class Schedule.

Official Calendar Course Descriptions are available in the Undergraduate and Graduate Calendars.

Official Course Outlines will be distributed at the first class of the term.

Fall 2024-Winter2025

PROFESSOR: James Deaville
DESCRIPTION: The research process, including the phases of conceptualization, gathering of sources, and writing up the completed research. Topics include: issues related to writing for the general and academic publics, conducting historical, cultural, and ethnographic research, undertaking interdisciplinary study, publishing scholarly research, preparing conference presentations, and writing grant applications. We will also consider the role of AI in music research.
Includes: Experiential Learning Activity
METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
READINGS: TBA

PROFESSOR: Ellen Waterman
DESCRIPTION: Listening holds a central place in music and sound studies both as a process integral to musicking and sounding and as a metaphor for certain kinds of attention. “Deep listening” is a metaphor for empathy producing good relations. “Hungry listening” is a metaphor for extraction producing bad relations. Listening is often evoked as an extrasonic metaphor, as in the advice to “listen to your body” and not overstrain sore muscles, or “listen to your heart” to make a good decision. Failure to listen is often cited as a reason for discord. Listening, then, is not only the active correlative to hearing, but a term that is applied to social relations. Brandon LaBelle has characterized listening in terms of “acoustic justice” making the link between sound, space, place, listening, and civil discourse. In this course we will look at the relationship between sound and listening. We’ll review key literature, research, and artistic work in Sound Studies and examine the turn towards what some scholars are beginning to call “Listening Studies.”
METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
READINGS: TBA

PROFESSOR: Lyndsey Copeland
DESCRIPTION: This “Music and Performance” seminar will examine musical and sonic performance genres intended or perceived to be erotic. Students will read foundational literature in the study of performance, eroticism, gender and sexuality, the senses, and sound. Students will analyze erotic genres across historical periods and generic categories, including Sufi devotional music, underwater opera, drag lip-sync, Italian troubadour songs, whale calling, and audio pornography.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: In-class participation
Listening journal
Audio-visual production
Writing assignments
READINGS: Readings and course materials will be available online via Brightspace.
CROSSLISTED WITH: MUSI 4200B

PROFESSOR: Jesse Stewart
DESCRIPTION: This graduate seminar explores the varied roles that music has played—and continues to play—as an agent of positive social change, offering students innovative opportunities to reflect, and act, on the relationships between music and human rights and to forge connections between academic work and struggles for social justice.
Includes: Experiential Learning Activity
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Participation (20%); Presentations (20%); Research essay (20%); Group project proposal (10%); Group project (30%)
READINGS: TBA

PROFESSOR: Carolyn Ramzy
DESCRIPTION: Music and Conflict examines music’s potential to solve or exacerbate contemporary social, political, and environmental conflicts. Through critical and interdisciplinary readings on governance, power, and agency, we will broadly investigate the question: what are the potentials of music to empower, or simply, to take power away? We will explore various issue-based case studies, and the role of music and sound cultures in various contexts: war and conflict; anti-oppression and anti-colonial activism, neoliberal capitalism, forced/voluntary migration; disease and healing; violence and poverty; and finally, climate change and environmental stewardships.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Discussion Leading & Seminar Participation 20%
Weekly Reading Guides 30%
Paper Abstract 15%
Final Presentation 15%
Final Paper 20%
READINGS: 1. Daughtery, Martin J. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. (e-book through MacOdrum Library)
2. Fast, Susan and Kip Pegley. 2012. Music, Politics, and Violence. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
3. O’Connell, John Morgan, and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco. 2010. Music and Conflict. Urbana: University of Illinois Press
CROSSLISTED WITH: ANTH 5708

PROFESSOR: Anna Hoefnagels
DESCRIPTION: In this course students learn and apply research methods common to ethnomusicological research, developing an ethnographic project that draws on critical contemporary theories in ethnomusicology. Students will select and work with musicians or a music community in the Greater Ottawa Area and develop a project that explores music-making practices, histories and goals. Throughout the term, students will explore ethical considerations in conducting research, will explore current themes in ethnomusicological research, and will engage in fieldwork methods, including interviewing, participant observation and thick description.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: Evaluation will include attendance and active participation in classroom discussions, weekly reading and reflection journals, a short presentation and written summary, and an extended and guided independent research project.
READINGS: Online readings
Cross-Listed with: MUSI 4102

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