Welcome to my course blog for WRDS 150 – Engaging Performance. This blog provides background information on various topics raised in class. These topics provide context and rationale for the approach I take. Please visit the blogs on peer review and the writing process to see how our work is carried out.
“Engaging Performance” Course Blurb
Music and language share some key features as topics of research. First, the range of practices and perspectives on music and language are enormous. Both topics can be studied based on their varying cultural products and situated practices. Language texts and musical works are situated, they occur a result of cultural norms, beliefs, and practices. We can study genres of written text and genres of music. We can also study the activities of language and the activities of music making. We can even combine these perspectives to explore creative adaptations of language and music in the form of genre violations, mixed genre products and cross-genre performances.
This section of WRDS 150 takes a discourse studies approach to exploring the way performance is presented in a range of scholarly texts on music. We will critically engage six academic articles representing different disciplinary perspectives on music – musicology (music as discourse), music theory (the role of analysis in the performance of music), ethnomusicology (ethnographic perspectives on performance), and music cognition (empirical research on music performance). In taking this focus, we will aim to identify 1) how different disciplines in music scholarship portray the role of performers and the activities of performance and 2) how the research methods and writing styles of these different disciplines contribute to producing different kinds of knowledge about performance. Our writing about performance will aim to construct bridges between practice and research, giving students an apprenticeship for entering the academic community. Students in the course will be encouraged to position themselves as researchers by engaging their experience of performance with the knowledge making in one or more of these disciplines.