Organized by Steven Morrison (Music)

This Senior Lecture Series will offer a series of lectures at a Seattle-area retirement community during Fall 2008. This series is designed to provide senior members of the Seattle community the opportunity to hear of recent scholarly work—presented in an engaging and accessible format—by UW faculty. Combining both this community’s desire for intellectual engagement and their interest in music, this series is intended to examine several ways in which music functions throughout normal human life. A common perception of music knowledge views expertise in music as (1) limited to a small population of highly trained and/or talented individuals, (2) the product of a structured formal regimen of training and (3) largely productive (performance-based) in nature. In contrast with this view, these lectures will examine music as an essential human phenomenon, a collection of knowledge and skills acquired by virtually every individual simply as a result of informal learning, appropriation and enculturation. Specifically, these lectures will examine the natural emergence of music making among children, the process by which musical understanding is shaped informally by cultural norms, ways in which one may investigate the cognitive and neurological basis of musical understanding, and the use of music in the development of individual and group identities. As a secondary purpose, based on the response to and interest in this topic, this limited series may serve as starting point for a more extensive series of lectures for the senior community possibly with an intergenerational component in a coming year.

Who's Musical? Music, Learning and Enculturation
Steven Morrison
What does it mean to be musical? What is a musical expert? Though virtually everyone in our society grows up in a music-filled environment, little attention is paid to young people's development as musically knowledgeable individuals. This introductory session will frame music as a type of knowledge common to all people, though uniquely constructed according to cultural norms. 

Music, Culture, and the Brain: How Culture Influences Musical Thinking 
Steven Demorest
Music shapes the brain just as the brain shapes what it recognizes as music. But do the very processes that allow us to understand one type of music hinder our ability to understand another? To identify how the brain makes sense of music, it is essential to consider many types of music and many types of listeners. Here we will examine ways in which researchers are seeking to discover the culturally determined boundaries of music knowledge. 

Music, Culture, and Community
Shannon Dudley
Whether it's a national anthem, a religious hymn, or a favorite song that we listened to with friends in high school, music often inspires in us a powerful sense of belonging.  This lecture will look at some of the ways people define their social identities (national, ethnic, generational, political, etc.) through music.  We will also analyze music-making as a form of social behavior, and consider some of the things our musical preferences may say about our values.

Born to Groove: Music in the Lives of Children
Patricia Shehan Campbell
For those who study music and culture, there is the recent emergence of an "anthropology of children's music.” Utilizing methods of musical ethnography, we are coming to know more of children's musical interests and needs, and the meanings they make of music (and life) through the songs they sing, the grooves they move, and the rhythms they play.  This lecture considers children and their own musical culture, with its own musical and social rules, and with functions such as integration of person and expression of ethnicity.

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