American Music and Cultural Criticism

Catalog description

We are all familiar with music as a mode of entertainment, accompaniment to rituals and ceremonies, earworms that sell us things. But how does music work? Not the nuts and bolts of ordering the sounds we call music, but how that same music is implicated in the gendered, racialized, and socioeconomic power structures that order our lives? For example: Is free jazz relevant to the civil rights movement of the 1960s? How and why is disco related to gay pride? What does musical minimalism have to do with consumerism? How might hip-hop and contemporary beat music be related to identity politics? With questions like these in mind, this communication intensive course investigates U.S. American vernacular musics as phenomena that create, reproduce, and push at the boundaries of structures of cultural power and value. Using conceptual lenses of representation, appropriation, ideology, experimentation, globalization, and modes of resistance, we will weave through American folk, avant-garde, free jazz, disco, hip-hop, and more. Music serves as our jumping-off point to think critically about the role of art in both creating the world we inhabit as well as informing how we navigate that world. As we approach different musics, we engage exemplary musical examples and texts from popular and scholarly sources to help frame discussions and written responses. Furthermore, we will listen to music both in and out of class with the goal of identifying, describing, and contextualizing what we hear. No previous musical training is required, concepts and terminology will be explained in class. A communication intensive course, we will have multiple opportunities to draft and workshop written responses via in-class peer-review and instructor feedback. Counts as a Communication Intensive course.