Dr Freya Jarman BA (Hons), MLitt, Ph.D, SFHEA

In its present form, this second-year module (*Opera and Politics*) covers primarily Italian and German repertoire over the long nineteenth century (from the French Revolution to the onset of WW1) while those two countries are emerging as nation states.

Previous teaching in this area has explored the musical construction of character, with a particular eye on issues of gender and race, and the exploration of these issues across adaptations. (For instance, how is Bizet's Carmen a different woman from Carmen Jones, or Beyonce's Carmen in *Carmen: A Hip Hopera*, and how can we hear those differences?)

A lot of what I've taught has included at least some consideration of these issues, but they come to the fore in a second-year UG module I teach called *Music, gender, and sexuality*. The module covers gender performativity and the core concepts of queer theory, and explores them in relation to a range of musical material.

Since I started working at Liverpool, I've been developing ways of talking about musical detail without recourse to standard western notation and its accompanying terminology. Specifically, I've developed a core first-year UG module called *Music as Sound*, which offers an approach to music analysis that is (a) usable by students without musical background and (b) challenging for students with formal classical training, by focusing on aural impressions, graphic representation, and spectrographic analysis using Audacity and Praat.