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2019 Grant Awards

Experimental Musics in Global Perspective

  • Jim Sykes
  • College of Arts & Sciences
  • First-Year Seminar Grant
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This course is a broad survey of experimental approaches to music and sound. Some musicians/inventions we consider include: Harry Partch’s instrument creations, which play scales based on just intonation and microtones; Conlon Nancarrow’s compositions for player piano; Maryanne Amacher’s experiments with otoacoustic emissions; Japanoise and noise rock; the new genres of “Black Midi” and glitch; developments in uses of field recordings; the global Maker Movement and DIY music technology; instrument inventions by the MIT media lab and used on Bjork’s “app” album; Chinese electronic music; metal in Indonesia; innovations in sound in some Hindu and Buddhist contexts in South and Southeast Asia; and appropriations of Balinese, Javanese, and West African musical ideas by Western composers like John Cage and Steve Reich. In the process, the course is a survey of the history of electronic musics and the invention of musical instruments in the twentieth century; a survey of the spread of Western styles of musical experimentation outside the West; and a consideration of how some distinct non-Western cultures praise or devalue innovation in their own ways. By exploring the intersections between physiology and culture, the course asks what it means to hear and make music “experimentally.”

  • 2019
  • College of Arts & Sciences
  • First-Year Seminar
  • Teaching Art Grant

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The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation

John McInerney (he/him)
Executive Director
215-573-0874
mcinernj@upenn.edu

Chloe Reison (she/her)
Associate Director
215-573-2159
reison@upenn.edu

Tamara Suber (she/her)
Administrative Assistant
215-898-0608
suber@upenn.edu

The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation is located on the Upper Mezzanine of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

3680 Walnut Street
Philadelphia PA

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