http://http://vimeo.com/14690790

UW Ph.D. candidate Matt Sumera interview clips
Filmed Thursday, August 26, 2010, by Jennifer Zettel for The Badger Herald.

For nine years, September 11, 2001, has been pointed to as a turning point in the culture, politics and shared burden of 21st century America.

The time since that day will be the focus of a new course at the University of Wisconsin, titled “Music, Aesthetics and War after 9/11.”

Matt Sumera, a UW Ph.D. candidate, created Music 497 to help students learn how to listen critically, something he said is often overlooked in favor of critical reading and thinking skills

Sumera’s research focuses on the connections and relationships between music and war, something he hopes will interest students and stimulate discussion.

“I want students to start asking those tough questions about how they understand war, how war is fought… through musical engagements and audio and visual engagements,” he said.

In addition to heavy metal, hip-hop and country the course will study a genre called anasheed, Islamic vocal music insurgents often set to video to provide emotional tone or garner a certain reaction, he said.

Sumera chose to start the class with Sept. 11 for a few reasons. Other than providing an event to centralize the course around, many studies have been conducted on the relationship between contemporary warfare and music after 9/11, he said.

“We’re still in the midst of those events with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “It’s important to sort of look through how music is implicated in those events and how… contemporary wars are actually fought in very musical ways.”

The course is not based on repertoire, making it accessible to non-music majors. Sumera said he hopes to have a nice mixture of music and non-music majors, as well as graduate and undergraduate students.

Non-music major enrollment is important for Sumera, who did his undergraduate work at UW as an English major.

“I’m also interested in trying to integrate music courses and the entire humanities, so opening up something that might be applicable to people who might not usually take music courses was really intriguing to me,” he said.

Music Professor Ron Radano approached Sumera about creating the course because a faculty member retired and has yet to be replaced.

Because of the class shortage, Radano said professors reach out to advanced graduate students or “recently minted Ph.D.s” to teach classes.

Radano said he and Professor Andy Sutton, who co-direct the UW ethno-musicology program, asked Sumera to create the course because they felt it speaks to the power music has in society, is taught by someone writing a dissertation on the subject and is relevant to the lives of students today.

“[Matt] has all the details and nuances I would love to learn about myself, but I’ve learned about it through working with him,” Radano said. “I think it’s going to be a really exciting opportunity for students to face this.”

As of the week before class started, six students were enrolled in the course, which Sumera said resulted from posting the course to the timetable late in the summer

Interested students can still enroll in Music 497. Sumera said while it says online the class is only open to music majors, just contact him for permission to enroll.