Music and Meaning

Details

When:

Where: The Hampton Inn

Cost: $165.00 for 6 session(s)

Type: In Person

Category:

• Humanities Courses
• Music & Theatre

Instructor: is a musical researcher, lecturer, and documentary filmmaker. He is a December 2012 graduate from the UA Fred Fox School of Music with a Master’s of Music in Ethnomusicology, and also holds an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Fine Arts from the UA.

Connecting with Music in our Lives and Our Culture

Music touches our lives in many ways, and on many levels – physically, emotionally, technologically and culturally. How can we better understand music’s place in our world, and in the process learn a bit about the important role that music has played in our own lives? This series will examine music in many forms, from the perspectives of scholarly research, cultural anthropology and documentary filmmaking.

Week 1: The Three Big Questions
Want to understand music and its role in our world? To do so, we only really need to ask three basic questions. We’ll examine these questions more deeply in a presentation on the music of West Africa.

Week 2: Musical Universals…and a Near-Universal Musical Experience
Is music really a “universal language”, and why or why not? Dan will share his UA-funded research and documentary film on the subject.

Weeks 3-4: Rock ‘n’ Roll, from Infancy to Adolescence
We will discuss rock ‘n’ roll’s early years, and learn about Zoom Records, a tiny 1950s Tucson record label, through Dan’s award-winning documentary film.

Week 5: The Shape of the Song
We’ll look at musical forms, from blues to pop to classical, as well as some challenging musical forms from indigenous cultures.

Week 6: Jazz Conventions
Learn to recognize the palette of “conventions” that make jazz performances sparkle and tie together the “musical threads” we’ve explored in this six-week series.