Music and Politics

Catalog description

This course examines music and politics in cross-cultural perspective. Some of the main questions the course explores are: why is music so important to social movements around the world? How have governments and non-governmental groups used music to build national solidarity? Why have so many states seen fit to censor certain music while promoting others? And what roles do markets and media play in which music circulate and become effectual catalysts of change? The course is based on listening, viewing audio-visual materials, reading historical, ethnographic, and analytic literatures, and discussing all of these materials in class. We will focus on music, cultural policy and change, in Bulgaria, the People's Republic of China; postcolonial popular music in Nigeria; histories of folk and popular music in social movements in North America, and music, religion and politics in Muslim majority societies such as Afghanistan and Iran. Students will leave the class having experienced a broad spectrum of musical genres, sounds, political systems, texts and attitudes about art, folk and popular music.