By Nick Laugher, Staff Contributor
Bombarded with images of scantily clad singers, lip-syncing bubble-gum pop songs, it’s not hard to see why the world is hesitant to consider contemporary music as anything more than frivolous entertainment. On the other side of the coin, we are given a picture of stuffy old composers, writing absurdly complex symphonies that scare people from even talking about music for fear of appearing uneducated. However, Dalhousie is taking a stance and embarking on a quest to quell some of the myths and misconceptions about popular music.
In offering a new graduate studies program in musicology – the first new graduate program at Dalhousie in over a decade – the university hopes to unite the contrasting factions of academic study and popular music. The program will allow students and faculty to look at the social and cultural impact of music entwined with history, gender issues, race and politics.
“It’s a look at music on the broader scale,” says Steven Baur, a professor of Musicology at Dalhousie. “Soundtracks, songs in advertising or political campaigns, composers … they effect us and the culture around us and we don’t even realize it.”
Professor Baur, like many of the faculty in the musicology program, is a relatively new addition. Only in the last 10 years has Dalhousie garnered a huge following in the area of musicology, marking an influx of new professors, or as Baur refers to them “fresh musicology blood.”
The intention of the Musicology program, which has already attracted a slew of international attention, is to investigate the way music affects our world.
“We don’t just look at the way music relates to social and cultural events over the course of time,” says Baur. “We look at how it contributes to these things.”
The program is largely interdisciplinary, not only allowing but heavily encouraging students to take courses from other faculties. Baur, who also co-edited the book The Beatles and Philosophy, is adamant about the idea of studying music in relation to different fields of study. Not just content with borrowing insights from the social sciences or philosophy, musicology aims to provide a new angle on these issues.
“The appearance of musicology has always been archaic composers, using mystical language to seem authoritative and alienating people from talking about it” says Baur.
The program aims to remove that air of arrogance and intimidation that musical studies carry with it, believing that music is an extremely universal and expressive thing that has infiltrated our culture and history for centuries.
Beginning with general introductory, courses that outline things such as research methods, bibliographies and the history of musicology, the program then opens up and students have the opportunity to take specialized courses that are tailored to each professors’ area of expertise. There are experts on everything from pop music, to opera, to contemporary Canadian composers.
Professors have been offering a new Music and Culture lecture series to the public in an effort to introduce the new field of study to the Dalhousie community.
David Schroeder’s lecture on the use of the piano as a seductive instrument in Hitchcock films was one such introduction. Schroeder’s lecture gave the public a preview of the type of material the program would offer, and served as an intro to the symbiotic relationship between music and culture. While Schroeder used the piano to expose the rhythmic way in which silent movies were composed, other professors will draw their own connections from music to anything from racial inequality to the way we interact as a society.
“This is a new, brighter era of Musicology,” remarks Baur. “We’re offering a very wide range of topics in an effort to amplify the idea of Musicology, so people realize how relevant it truly is.”
The program is open to the idea of what can be called music by setting aside the lingering classical bias and accepting a diverse array of music.
“Musicology, traditionally, was largely taught by the specialists for the specialists,” Baur says regretfully. “Music is deeply relevant to our culture and we want to be the translators; we want to make it accessible.”
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