Undergraduate Course:

Music and the Internet 1990 – 2020 with Lucie Vágnerová

This seminar investigates the impact of digitality, the Internet, and today's big tech companies on music. From digital formats and workstations, to music piracy, and the impact of file sharing and streaming platforms, students will explore how music-making, consumption, and communities have changed in the last forty years. Through readings in music and media studies, sociology, press, documentary film, and digital media, students will consider the following questions: how has music sounded in the Internet era? How have social structures like class, race, gender, local community, and nation operated in digital and online spaces devoted to music? What kinds of experimental, multimedia, and popular genres have emerged? Does the Internet democratize music? To what extent have music-oriented institutions changed?

Graduate Course:

Theorizing Labor in Music with Lucie Vágnerová

Musical culture gets overwhelmingly associated with leisure, not work. This musicology seminar explores the many forms of economic, affective, political, and interpretive labor that make music possible. Introducing students to theoretical frameworks particularly sensitive to the role of social difference, regulated capitalism, and technology, the seminar asks: what do we learn about music when we approach music as labor? Readings in musicology, labor history, music education, ethnomusicology, anthropology, media studies, critical race theory, and gender studies will anchor discussions of topics such as bans on recording, artificially intelligent composition software, lullabies, music lessons, song collecting, copyright, electronics manufacturing, and the soundtrack of labor movements.