Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy has become the first person to graduate with a degree in The Beatles.
Liverpool Hope University launched the Master of Arts course ‘The Beatles – Popular Music and Society’ in 2009.
According to the University website the course is, “A unique opportunity to study in the city of Liverpool, home of The Beatles and with access to leading Popular Music academics and Beatles specialists, this MA is the only one of its kind in the UK and the world.”
“This MA will examine the significance of the music of the Beatles in the construction of identities, audiences, ethnicities and industries, and localities; by doing so it will suggest ways to understand popular music as a social practice, focusing attention on issues such as the role of music in the construction of regional identities, concepts of authenticity, aesthetics, meaning, value, performance, and the use of popular music as a discursive evocation of place. Furthermore, in a consideration of popular music as a text, popular music semiotics will also be employed”.
“This MA will be of interest to those working in the fields of popular music studies, cultural studies, social anthropology, politics, gender studies, and musicology, among others. Such a course is an essential addition to the discipline of Popular Music Studies”.
The Course is broken into four parts:
-Texts and Contexts: Understanding Popular Music - This will offer the student an understanding of how Popular Music Studies has expanded and developed to deal with the changing nature of popular music over the past 50 years. This module will also provide students with contextually related research methods.
-Topics in History: Liverpool - This module will introduce and discuss musical production and consumption within the post WWII era and will discuss the roles of locality, economics, space and place, and other issues specifically relating to Merseyside.
-Musicology and the Beatles - In this module students will take a popular music semiotics approach and will textually analyse a variety of Beatles material.
-Historical and Critical Approaches - Students will be invited to study a more ethnographic approach to the Beatles, the various cultural discourses surrounding their music, and the local tourist industry established in Liverpool to capitalise on the group.
Mary-Lu is from Ontario, Canada and moved to Liverpool two years ago to study the course. She will return to Canada and resume her job as a teacher in Popular Music Studies.
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