“MUSICS (AND MUSIC RESEARCHERS) OF JAPAN”:
Japanese music, like Japanese culture, is sometimes thought to be homogeneous, but in fact there is and always has been great diversity within Japan. This course will explore this diversity in terms of both the music itself (e.g., folk, Indigenous, popular, art) and the research approaches used to study music (e.g., music cognition, ethnomusicology, evolutionary biology, music information retrieval). We will select a diverse sample of research articles submitted as part of the course selection assignment. Students will be required to read these research articles each week. Each student will choose the research article that interests them the most, form groups with others who have chosen the same article, and give a brief presentation followed by extended discussion.