This seminar, using jazz as a case study, will examine the meaning of popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries: What makes popular music different from other forms of music? What constitutes creativity and genius in jazz and in what ways have these constructions affected popular music more broadly? How and why does popular music affect large numbers of people? How does a popular music gain and lose its popularity? What happens to a particular form of popular music associated with the culture and commerce of one particular country when it is globalized? How do musicians in other countries change an American popular music and does that change affect how Americans perform it? How has the business of selling music changed since the inception of jazz in 1917? Why has the business of selling popular music declined so sharply today, although with devices such as iPods music is listened to more than ever? Can popular music transcend social constructions or does it re-inscribe them? How is popular music affected by the technology that disseminates it? How does popular music generate criticism of itself? Who constructs the official history of a form of popular music like jazz? How does popular music develop a pedagogy, as it frequently, in its early days particularly when it is conceived of as anti-bourgeois, is not taught in schools, indeed, often it is actively opposed in school curricula (think of the opposition in schools to Rock and Roll and Rap music)? Can popular music be political in any significant sense, especially jazz which is often performed as instrumental music? What sort of neurological and psychological effects does a particular form of popular music like jazz have? Is popular music like jazz therapeutic? If so, how?

The seminar hopes to set forth new ways of thinking about the trajectory of popular music and the complicated blend of elements that come together to make some unique form of popular music appear. The seminar also hopes to offer fresh ways for scholars of different disciplines to incorporate more sophisticated and rigorous ways of analyzing popular music in their scholarship and their teaching to more fully illuminate and enrich their subjects.