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Module

MUS3005 : Global Popular Musics (Inactive)

  • Inactive for Year: 2024/25
  • Module Leader(s): Dr Goffredo Plastino
  • Owning School: Arts & Cultures
  • Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus
Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Semester 1 Credit Value: 10
Semester 2 Credit Value: 10
ECTS Credits: 10.0
European Credit Transfer System

Aims

The module is intended:

• to give the students the possibility to explore the diversity and complexity of global popular musics through case studies from different world countries and cultural areas;

• to consider and examine key works in contemporary scholarship about popular music;

• to analyse musical processes, genres, and repertoires in global popular musics.

Outline Of Syllabus

Themes of lectures in Global Popular Musics will include: popular music scholarship in Spain, Japan, Brazil and Italy; new flamenco and Spanish pop; Italian beat bands in the 1960s; samba and the music market in Brazil in the 1990s; Japanese rockabilly in the 1950s and 1960s; radical Basque rock; Celtic music in Galicia; Brazilian tecnobrega; Japanese live rock festivals; music markets in Italy; fado in Rio de Janeiro; Spanish jazz 1930s to 1960s; J-Pop; 1970s Italian progressive rock in the UK; Spanish and Italian singer-songwriters.

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities
Category Activity Number Length Student Hours Comment
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesLecture102:0020:00N/A
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesDrop-in/surgery44:0016:00N/A
Guided Independent StudyIndependent study1164:00164:00N/A
Total200:00
Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Popular music studies have progressed from the initial focus on methodologies to exploring a variety of genres, scenes, works and performers. British and North-American music have been privileged and studied first, not only for their geographic and generational proximity to scholars, but also for their tremendous impact. Everything else has been often relegated to the dubious “world music” category, with a “folk” (or “roots”, or “authentic”) label attached.

Global Popular Musics has been devised to offer to students a direct access to scenes, works and performers that have been mostly not much or at all considered in the current literature, and at the same time to provide a better understanding of the different approaches in the field of non-Anglophone scholarship.

Lectures will introduce issues, approaches and concepts, and give the opportunity to discuss and explore these further. Lectures will focus partly on the detailed study of music from a selected global popular music culture or area, partly on key issues that arise in the course of such study, and partly on the various approaches that musicologists may take. During their private study time students are expected to work on a variety of activities between classes such as reading and listening. Among other things, these form essential preparation for lectures.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Other Assessment
Description Semester When Set Percentage Comment
Essay2A1004500 words
Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The essay must show
(i) how well students have assimilated aspects of the course material
(ii) their ability to formulate a critical position on the material, and
(iii) their ability to communicate all the above.

Reading Lists

Timetable