School Of Humanities And Communication ArtsModes and Codes of Music ProductionWestern Sydney University Unit Code: 101528.3
Discipline: MUSIC
Student Contribution Band: 1
Level: 2
Credit Points: 10
Equivalent Units
101084 - Contemporary Arts 3: Politics and Communities
About this Unit
In 2018 this unit replaced by 102552 - The Politics of Australian Music. The unit explores the impact of globalisation on codes, practices and modes of music production. It examines debates in music about the personal and the political, and the cultural and the economic. Adorno’s theories of standardisation and Attali’s idea that industrialisation gives rise to music becoming silenced through the mechanism of repetition (mass production, stockpiling and control by the music industry) will serve as the starting point for the unit. The unit will look at how music is positioned within global and local contexts. It will include topics on the operations of ideology and constructions of identity, including that of musical identity. How does the concept of genre have relevance to politics and aesthetics in music? How do technology and the digital revolution subvert the genre categories which have taken shape in music over the 20th century and beyond? The unit will uncover the multiple ways in which listeners, composers, operators, and producers give rise to an infinite array of possibilities in ‘music’.