2024-2025

Popular and Global Music Studies, Undergraduate Certificate

Kitt School of Music

College of Arts and Letters

The Popular and Global Music Certificate provides students an opportunity to explore the contemporary world of music and sound.

The Popular and Global Music Studies Certificate introduces students to popular and global musics, focusing on the analysis of their sounds as well as their social, political, and ecological contexts. The certificate program provides students an opportunity to explore musical traditions from around the world, including, but not limited to, musics of Central/South/North America, Europe, Australia, Africa, and Asia. Likewise, the program provides opportunities for the exploration of American popular musics (jazz, country, reggae, rock, electronic music, and the singer-songwriter tradition, among others) as well as global popular musics resulting from globalization. The program offers students a sustained and focused look at music as an aesthetic and social force, developing analytical and communication skills across traditions. Students who complete the certificate are prepared to engage with the contemporary world of music and sound sensitively and creatively.

  • To receive an undergraduate certificate (at least 15 units) at Northern Arizona University, you must complete a planned group of courses from one or more subject matter areas with a cumulative grade point average of at least 2.0.

    Please be aware that federal financial aid is not available for some certificates if the certificate is pursued and completed as a stand-alone certificate (i.e., not completed concurrently with a degree program). See the "Details" tab for additional information.

Students may be able to use some courses to meet more than one requirement. Contact your advisor for details.

Minimum Units for Completion 15
Major GPA 2.0

Purpose Statement

The Popular and Global Music Studies Certificate introduces students to popular and global musics, focusing on the analysis of their sounds and their social, political, and ecological contexts. The program provides students an opportunity to explore music traditions from around the world, including, but not limited to, the musics of Central/South/North America, Europe, Australia, Africa, and Asia. Likewise, the program provides opportunities for the exploration of American popular musics (jazz, country, reggae, rock, electronic music, and the singer-songwriter tradition, among others) as well as global popular musics resulting from globalization. The program offers students a sustained and focused look at music as an aesthetic and social force, developing analytical and communication skills across traditions. Students who complete the certificate are prepared to engage sensitively and creatively with the contemporary world of music and sound.

The certificate program is academic in nature. Students examine musical practices and aesthetics of popular and global music from cross-cultural perspectives. In doing so, they develop an understanding and appreciation of the human experience as it is explained and expressed in the analysis and activity of popular and global musics. Furthermore, students develop an awareness of music’s technological history and how its tools, digital and non-digital, have guided aesthetic values of popular and global musics. As such, students explore popular and global musics in relation to globalization, mass media enterprises, and consumption. These explorations provide students with frameworks to begin to articulate how popular and global musics reflect and shape societies, political systems, and cultures. Even further, students develop sensitivities to how music and sound shape our world and sentient perceptions of it, and, more broadly, to the ways in which humans move and act within their ecologies.

Students pursuing the following careers would benefit from the Popular and Global Music Certificate: K12 music education and K12 education, hospitality, marketing/business, social work, music therapy, acoustical engineering, nonprofits, and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), architecture, music performance of all traditions, entertainment law, and medicine/nursing, among others.

Music BA and Music Performance (Instrumental) majors cannot complete the certificate.

Student Learning Outcomes

  • Examine and compare musical practices and aesthetics of popular and global musics from cross-cultural perspectives.
  • Demonstrate an understanding of how human experiences (e.g., embodied, emotional, social, spiritual) are explained and expressed in the analysis and performance of popular and global musics.
  • Engage in nuanced discussions of how music’s technological history and how its tools (digital and non-digital) have evolved to represent and shape the social and aesthetic values of popular and global musics.
  • Identify popular and global musics' relationship to globalization, mass media enterprises, and consumption,
  • Articulate how popular and global musics reflect and shape societies, political systems, and cultures.
  • Express sensitivities to how music and sound shape the perceived world, as well as how humans move and act within their ecologies, in which music and sound are critically enmeshed.

Certificate Requirements

  • This certificate may only be pursued and completed concurrently with a degree program. This certificate is not available as a stand-alone certificate.

Additional Information

  • Students enrolled in this certificate may not enroll in or pursue the following due to the number of overlapping units:

  • Be aware that some courses may have prerequisites that you must also successfully complete. For prerequisite information, click on the course or see your advisor.