HMVB01601U Musicology: Musicological Seminar: Meme Music: History, Aesthetics & Theory of a Musical Practice

Music and sound art these days takes place to an ever growing extent online on social media and streaming platforms. The tiniest snippets of sound and video can gather a planetary audience and the simplest alterations to an existing track or composition might just create a new musical piece or propose a whole different musical aesthetics: 8-Bit versions of major hits, disturbing cut-ups, incredibly slowed down pieces, sonified datasets and assemblages of image, text and sound.

In this course, we explore together the history of this musical practice, its most recent aesthetic examples, and the theoretical discourse that has evolved around this craft and artform. We will discuss the political appropriations of musical genres and pieces, we will question memes as coping strategies in times of doubt, catastrophe, and anxiety, we will investigate, how memes constitute a new musical culture, and we will analyze how memes can even be part of teaching practices. In this course we will also be reserving enough space for new memes of the week to be analyzed - and we might develop new memes and try to disseminate them.