Relevant Courses

MUSI 150 Music Cultures of the World. Sarah Weiss
An introductory survey of selected musical traditions from around the world. Structure, content, materials, and performance contexts of local musics, as well as the broader role music plays in society.

MUSI 225 Javanese Gamelan Performance. Sarah Weiss
A study of Javanese musical genres from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Introduction to the playing techniques of multiple instruments. Survey of theoretical and aesthetic discourses on gamelan and other Indonesian performance. Members of the class form the nucleus of the Yale Javanese Gamelan Ensemble. (No previous experience in gamelan performance required. May be repeated for course credit, but not for distributional credit.)

MUSI 376 World Music Theories: Practice and Aesthetics. Sarah Weiss
Survey of the musical processes of various mode-based musical systems, selected from the Indian raga, Arabic maqam, Irish tune-family, Javanese pathet, Persian dastgah, and Vietnamese Dieu. Readings about eh musical cultures are combined with notation and analysis of the music as well as discussion about the related aesthetics systems. (prerequisite: MUSI 211a or b or equivalent)

MUSI 420 Gendering Musical Performance. Sarah Weiss
A critical examination of the discourse on gender, sexuality and music. Grounded in the cross-cultural detail of specific musical genres and performers, we will examine the ways in which issues of race, class, ethnicity, spirituality, and embodiment intersect with gender in the shaping of musical cultures and aesthetics.