What is it all about?

Music, . . .

It’s important, right?.. Right. . .

Most of us remember some sort of music lesson, like piano lessons, or probably even moreso, piano practice

Music been attributed with all kinds of things:

Calming the Savage Beast, A Universal Language, Making the world a better place, Helping save the world, Mood change, mental health, cultural identity, social activism, buidling community, healing our ills,

In fact, music supposedly does a long list of things. But does it? And if it does, how does it do it?
How does this thing called music work?

There are different types of music studies that ask the same question, how does music works?

Historical Musicology looks at history to see how music functioned historically and how it developed as an art.

Music Theory looks at the materials of music -- notes, rhythms, melodies, harmonies -- to uncover how sounds interact.

Ethnomusicology (sometimes called World Music Studies) looks at music and its cultural underpinnings in various world cultures (very cool)

Music Therapy looks at music as a therapeutic medium, a way to help people feel better and manage in their lives. While Community Music examines music in social integration, community formation, as well as its engagement in activism and contemplation.

Contextual Studies is a relatively new area that borrows approaches from those larger disciplines and combines with sociology, cultural studies, political science, and more to examine not just how music works but it delves into what music actually means.

To whom? To people. But not just you and me. . people taking or teaching courses at a Western university. But, to all kinds of people in different situations. And to examine that, contextual studies look at music within its own social medium. That is, how it interfaces with actual human beings in social contexts.

That's why we call the course Music and Its Contexts or just "contexts" for short.

At the time of this recording our world has 7.6 billion people in it by UN estimates. Let that sink in for a moment. -- 7.6 billion. That’s an insane number of beings on the planet -- incomprehensible. To give you some perspective, the entire population of Canada at the time of confederation in 1867 was about 3 million people. That’s the entire country coast to coast. Today, Toronto alone has almost 6 million people, twice the number of the entire country of canada only about 100 years ago.

And the vast majority of those people LOVE music. In fact, a 2006 survey in the United States revealed that 28 million people self-identified as choral singers. That’s only one form of music making and without expanding it out to include Canada. . that makes choral singing alone the most popular past time in North America, more popular as a participatory activity than hockey, soccer, football, skiing, knitting, fly fishing, etc.

So, what is the big deal about music? Well, first there isn’t just one kind of music, right?

We are accustomed to to thinking about music as different types according to a classification system that goes something like this:

Pop, rock, jazz, hiphop, rap, R&B, Soul, Funk, Reggae, Classical, and World

These are styles of music in a broad scope, but would it surprise you to learn that they are categories devised by the retail music industry in order to sell music more effectively? It’s important to look at music and its relationship to money, and we will. That’s how contextual studies work -- we can try to see what music means when looking through a particular perspective. In this way, contexts can be thought of a window.

Contexts can also be thought of as containers. So there's music that is used as praise music, or ritual music, or entertainment music, or dance music. So many boxes. So little time.

The box can be the context. . like a dance concert. . the music means something in that box. . . symphony orchestra music recorded with a beat track in back? That means something in that dance box. . . It means something else in the box of a classical music concert hall. So, in these cases, contexts are situational.

Looking at the way music works within various social constructs allows us to see how music is a fundamental and essential human activity. That is, music is essential to our humanity. This class looks at our relationship to music from a variety of perspectives via a variety of social contexts.

David Byrne, famous frontman for The Talking Heads, say it best in his book “How Music Works”:

. . .music placed in different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning. . . .the same piece of music could either be an annoying intrusion abrasive and assaulting, or you could find yourself dancing to it. How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation. . but in large part by what surrounds it [that is, the community it is attached to], where you hear it [geography, physical setting, some music is just not transportable], and when you hear it [time is a context too]. How it’s performed, how it’s sold and distributed, how it’s recorded, who performs it, whom you hear it with, and of course, finally, what it sounds like these are the things that determine not only if a piece of music works -- if it successfully achieves what it sets out to accomplish -- but what it is.

What Byrne is telling us is that music isn’t so much just the sonic elements, that is, the sounds, but something more elusive and slippery. What music is and I think here he is speaking really about “what it means” is at the intersection of contexts. So, contexts determine what music means and in the process, what it actually is.