Academic Team:
Toby Koenigsberg (tobyk@uoregon.edu)
First-Year Experience Seminar Instructor
Emeline Thomas (etho@uoregon.edu)
FIG Assistant
9 credits
UGST 109 First Year Experience Seminar – 1 credit
CRN: 16273: W: 3:00pm-3:50pm, ANS 192
MUS 151 Popular Songwriting – 4 credits
CRN: 13912, WEB ASYNCH CINE 230
Remix Cultures – 4 credits
CRN: 11382: TR: 10:00am- 11:50am, ESL 105
Matrix View Schedule
About the FIG:
This FIG provides an introduction to the campus and local popular music scene, including curricular and extracurricular activities in music and related disciplines. Non-musicians are welcome!
MUS 151 Popular Songwriting - CoreEd or major satisfying course
This course, designed for students seeking to learn about popular music, will examine three aspects of music: the societal and cultural context that produces musical style, the technical construction of the music itself, and the resultant ideas that music expresses.
This course shows, through hands-on experience, how and in what societal context the particular musical techniques used by popular songwriters over the past half century were developed, and how they have achieved, and continue to achieve, the expression of specific ideas. Students will learn how to write songs, and they will learn how the musical choices they make as songwriters, and the choices that others have historically made, express and reflect societal and cultural ideas and trends.
This course meets the criteria for the Arts and Letters Area of Inquiry because it encourages students to engage in the modes of inquiry that define the discipline of music, including performance, composition, analysis, and the study of societal and cultural context. Students learn to analyze music from both a technical and an expressive perspective, and to discern relationships between the two.a
CINE 230 Remix Cultures - CoreEd or major satisfying course
In "Remix Cultures," students learn the historical, practical, and critical views of "intellectual property" (IP) by analyzing everything from the UO mascot to Jay-Z. The course highlights how “ideas” are part of a remix continuum: new ideas often remix the great ideas that preceded them and will themselves be remixed in the future. Students will deconstruct the relationship between politics and economics and interrogate the everyday ways that their lives are governed by (and often break) IP laws. Remix Cultures provides students with a broad yet fundamental knowledge of how "IP" and "innovation" impact their lives: students of all majors engage with intellectual properties daily and may seek professions in fields that valorize intellectual property. By asking all students to actively and critically engage consumer media culture as intellectual property, the course provides a better understanding of how collaborative efforts are governed by laws that typically value and reward a singular author/genius.