Graduate Courses 2025-2026

MUSIC 501: What Makes Music Last?

Fall 2025: Monday, 2-4:50 p.m.
Instructor: Fabio Morabito

This class is open to all students across the University of Alberta. There is no prerequisite and as such it *doesn’t require any previous knowledge* for you to take it.

For the past two centuries, the culture of Western art music has consisted largely of the consumption of earlier repertoires: music surviving its own time, heard and reheard as a model of excellence. J. S. Bach is still celebrated today, but his wife (also a competent musician) is not; Mozart is, but his just-as-prolific contemporary Antonio Rosetti isn’t. This is why, in common parlance, we refer to Western art music simply as “classical.” It is – for better or worse – a selection of musical monuments. The idea of an artistic canon (treating certain pieces of music and certain musicians as worthy of continued appreciation) is one of the most complex historical structures of the West, yet one we tend to take for granted. Who chose/chooses the monuments and how? Who is excluded and why? This class offers an exploration of key issues and conceptual tools to evaluate notions of authorial immortality/greatness in Euro-colonial environments since the eighteenth century. To this period date many practices that shaped our enduring fascination with these larger-than-life figures: from biographies boasting heroic accounts of musicians’ lives and compositional progress, to thinking of artistic creativity as a product of masculine prowess and virility, which sustained the creation of a male-dominated artistic canon.

MUSIC 583: Studies in Musical Genre: Indigenous Experiments in Music & Sound

Fall 2025: Tuesday & Thursday, 2-3:20 p.m.
Instructor: Patrick Nickleson

What is the current state of musical experimentalism among Indigenous artists in North America and globally? Following a few preparatory weeks of reading on the longer tradition of Euro-American musical experimentalism, we will explore the work of a different artist every week, including a number of regional and international Indigenous guest artists who will be invited to visit and share their artistic practice. Our focus will be on how these experimentalists are building on, challenging, refusing, reframing, and/or grounding the normative categories of (a sometimes implicitly white) “experimental music.”

*Literacy in Western musical notation is not required for this course.* Each week will feature several readings from academic scholarship across music studies, Indigenous studies, and critical engagements from popular press music and arts magazines. We will pair these contextual readings with direct documentation of the artists’ practice, whether graphic scores, recordings, sculpture and museum objects, or film and photographic reproductions. Course evaluations will combine regular short critical writings on particular artists and their work, with long form research essays. I am also open to curatorial and artists’ statements or sound or music portfolios as substitutes for some assignments.

MUSIC 588: Studies in Music and Media: Popular Music and Streaming Media

Fall 2025: Wednesday, 9-11:50 a.m.
Instructor: Brian Fauteux

In Music 488/588, we will investigate the multiple ways that streaming media technology has altered music and culture over the past few decades. In the streaming media era, music has become increasingly ubiquitous, accessible, ephemeral, and, arguably, devalued. At the same time, streaming media has disrupted the chart dominance of radio friendly hits and seen the rise and chart success of hip hop artists, Spanish-speaking superstars, and music styles from around the world. In this seminar, we will look at the ways that our relationship with music has changed as streaming media moves from being an imperfect feature of the early internet to the dominant mode of music listening today.

Topics we will cover in close detail include: musician and fan labour, questions around the value of music on streaming services, debates around the role of copyright in the music industries, record label and Big Tech industry concentration, the ways that more traditional music media like the radio and television have adapted (or not) in the streaming era, the growth of social media platforms for circulating new and old music, and the ways we might imagine a more viable future for working musicians.

This course is designed for both upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in Music, or those students in other departments with an interest in popular music and media. It is also approved as a 400-level elective course for Media Studies majors.

MUSIC 665: Issues in Ethnomusicology

Fall 2025: Friday, 9-11:50 a.m.
Instructor: Michael Frishkopf

Ethnomusicology can be defined as "the meaningful social practice of studying music as a meaningful social practice" (Frishkopf 2011) This course aims to catalyze your critical understanding of the field of ethnomusicology, considered as a practice, a discourse, a literature, an intellectual history, and a shifting social network, by cultivating familiarity with its issues, sources, theories, methods, and seminal figures, and its self-positioning in relation to other scholarly domains (especially anthropology and musicology). Together we’ll explore the ways in which ethnomusicology has formulated itself by drawing upon related fields of the human sciences, such as anthropology, folklore, linguistics, psychology, sociology, economics, history, political science, and literary studies, applying a variety of theoretical models to ethnomusicological data. The course also aims to introduce you to ethnomusicology's principal scholarly sources, rapidly traversing a wide array of ethnomusicological literature, while pausing to consider landmark works in greater depth. Finally, this course encourages development of your own research directions in ethnomusicology, and a deeper understanding of the research process, through preparation of an original research proposal.