Program Overview

Elective Courses

Special Topics in the History of Popular Music

Debates, controversies, and methods in the historiography of popular music, featuring case studies.

PMC 9732  Taste and the Cultural History of Popular Music
Investigating how the remarkable industrial and cultural transformations in popular music between the swing era and the Beatles have been formulated and understood, the course engages with a wide range of theoretical, historiographic, and political economic questions. The course will also examine the historical production and reproduction of social identity and power through high/low hierarchies within popular musical taste formations.

The seminar will examine the process of making records as it unfolds from the initial conception of a song to the final mix captured on disc, and participants will address both texts and performances in order to explore the relationships between author, text, performance, and audience. In other words, the seminar will study the methods by which ideas generated by recordists are imparted to audiences.

Topics in Music, Industry, and Technology

Explorations in the interrelationship of musical technologies and the music industries. Topics may include political economy, theories of technology and society, impact of technology on music making, transformations in the status of the musical commodity in the digital age, and more.

PMC 9751 Special Topic: Copyright, Creativity, Technology and the Music Industry
This course explores the interrelationships between copyright law, creativity, digital technologies and the music industries and asks how they affect the creation, distribution and reuse of music. The Canadian Copyright Act will be considered with an emphasis on its treatment of musical works, performances and recordings; and the contemporary copyright policy-making process will be viewed from the perspective of various stakeholders. (Cross-listed with LIS 9814 and MS 9214)

Examinations of the multiple definitions of identity, as well as the role of popular music in identity formation (e.g., gender, generation, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, class) and ethnographies of production and reception.

PMC 9761  Special Topic: Space, Place, Music
This course examines the politics of pop inside the social, political and economic contexts of contemporary globalization. Attention will be paid to the various ways that popular music helps us imagine ourselves as members of different local, regional, national and extra-national communities. Connected to this line of enquiry will be others on how competing notions of music’s social and monetary value complicate popular music’s production, distribution and reception. (Cross-listed with MS 9321)

PMC 9762  Special Topic: Race, Culture, Music
This course examines interdisciplinary approaches to the study of race, ethnicity, and popular music across different cultural locations and genres. The course is taught as a seminar with extensive discussion of the readings along with detailed presentations about and critiques of the works read. (Cross-listed with MS 9320)