Prof. Marilyn Gottschall Office:  Platner 118 Phone: 907-4200 x 4233 mgottschall@whittier.edu Spring 2003  T-Th 3:00  Platner 202  Office Hours:  T-Th 1:30-2:30

Course Overview:  This course delves into the complex intersection of sound, religion,  experience, and culture.  It assumes that by exploring sacred music and varieties of sound-induced or sound-enhanced religious experience, we can learn much about the ways in which groups of people construct religious meaning and understand their world.  While we will need to understand something of basic beliefs and doctrines, our exploration of religion will focus on musical forms of practices and embodied experiences of the sacred.

Some of the questions that will engage us are: Why and how does music evoke such a wide variety of religious expressions, from quiet devotion to mystical ecstasy, trance and possession?  How can we find meaning in the sound experience and musical cultures that are vastly different from our own?  How does music serve to hold religious and ethnic communities together?   We will seek to answer these questions through a focus on particular forms of sacred music in very particular communities of belief: Islam and Santeria.  We will also examine the African American spiritual roots of popular music in America.

The class will examine several broad themes as we explore the intersection of musical form and religious tradition.  Those themes include:

·         Meaning and Sacred Sound:  cultural understandings of sound and the ways in which that understanding shapes and is shaped by music

·         Religious Music in Rite and Ritual:  the role of music as a marker of sacred time and place in institutional rituals

·         Sacred Sound as Healing Agent:  Shamanism and Possession as therapeutic agents

·         Sound as Religious Practice:  Song, chant, meditation and ecstasy as a pursuit of the union with divinity

·         Sacred Music and Communal Bonds:  Music as an agent of cultural memory, social action and identity

Required texts:

1        Benzon, Beethoven’s Anvil

2        Rouget, Music and Trance

3        Sells, Approaching the Qur’an

4        Sylvan, Traces of the Spirit

5        Velez, Drumming for the Gods

Course Requirements:

1.      Attendance is assumed.  You are allowed 3 absences before your grade is affected.

2.      Participation:  This class combines lecture with class discussion and full participation on your part.  It will take you to novel and interesting places cognitively (through our readings), physically (through field trips, aurally (through sound recordings), visually (through videos), and experientially (through guest speakers and music making).  There will be plenty to process and integrate, but you need to be ready to be fully present.  This includes being current in your readings and being ready to discuss them.

3.      Special events and field trips :  A variety of special events will be part of this class, including drum and dance workshops, field trips and guest speakers.  These include:

-          Feb 19   Adaawe drum/dance workshop

-          Feb 23   Adaawe concert

-          April 25  Field trip to Dances of Universal Peace

-          Bata concert:  to be scheduled

4.      Work load, assignments, and evaluation :

·         Course notebook:  I would like you to keep a course notebook (looseleaf) in which you keep short assignments and journal entries.  You will be assigned regular journal entries and short assignments which I will collect on a regular basis.

·         Class presentation on popular music: from Sylvan

·         Exams:  We will have a take-home midterm exam.

·         Qur’an assignment:  You will do a substantial assignment on the Qur’an which can take one of two forms:  you may either recite (in Arabic) a Qur’anic sura, or you may write an analysis of two recitations of the same sura, comparing recitation principles and categories (6-8 pages).

·         Sacred Sound final presentation and paper:  you will select a sound system and present it to the class in terms of class concepts.  Your presentation will focus on SOUND practices rather than the beliefs and theologies of the group selected.  Your paper should be no longer than 10 pages.

5.      Grading

1)      Journals and short assignments                               100 points

2)      Popular music presentation                                     50 points

3)      Midterm exam                                                      100 points

4)      Qur’an assignment                                                100 points

5)      Final presentation and paper                                  100 points

6)      Attendance and participation                                  50 points