MUS 246 - Musics of Brazil

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR: Meets general academic requirement AR and DE.
This course examines Brazilian musics in the folk, popular, and concert traditions attending particularly to the way Brazilian musics articulate ideas about ethnic, racial, regional, and national identities in a globalized world. We consider the ways Brazilian music takes shape within and against the country’s tumultuous political history, examining moments of political and cultural critique and collaboration. Texts for the class are drawn from both secondary sources-articles and books written by scholars-and primary sources, including movement manifestos, song texts, and first-person accounts by performers and composers. Many of the traditions that we will discuss are aurally and orally transmitted, and we will perform them in order to develop a visceral understanding of the music’s organization.