Relevant Courses since 2007
See www.yale.edu/seas/Courses for this year's offerings.

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 306a 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. Survey of the musical cultures; notation and analysis of the music; related aesthetics systems

MUSI 353b, Topics in World Music. Sarah Weiss
d A critical introduction to selected cultures of world music. Specific cultures vary from year to yera but generally include those of Native America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa the Middle East adn the Caribbean.

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.

MUSI 420 Musical Hybridity and Cultural Interaction. Sarah Weiss
What is musical hybridity? Do hybrid musical styles ever come to be considered pure or original? Or, thinking from the other direction, were musical styles now considered pure ever hybrid? What are the musical implications of cultural interaction? What are the cultural implications of musical interaction? How does hybridity discourse intersect with postcolonial discourse? How do audience expectations determine the reception of hybrid musical performances in different places around the world? What does hybridity mean to people who experience and/or create it? With the 'edges' of the world as our boundary, we will explore the musical results of cultural interactions in several locations and periods. Some of these may include: musical manifestations of European fascination with/fear of the Other during the colonial period and orientalism; touristic performance cultures in Asia; the nexus between local popular musics, postcoloniality, and global world beat; the exploration/incorporation/exclusion of the world through the work of new music composers (from around the world) over the last century.