First-Year Writing Seminar: The Sounds Beneath Your Feet: Downtown Music and Downtown Memory

Catalog description

In the book Here by the artist Richard McGuire, one undistinguished place—a corner of a living room like the one where McGuire grew up—is pictured through time. The images are juxtaposed across the pages with multiple insets, portraying that same spot in hundreds of moments, as if McGuire were using magic glasses: 1949 (a mother cradles an infant), 1993 (a teenager dances), 1910 (two men fight, with a stick!), 1624 (before there was a house), 10,000 B.C. (before there were any houses: a bison sits in marshland). McGuire’s point, or one of them, is that history doesn’t need monuments—we walk on its layers everywhere and at all times. The musical history of the 20-block radius around NYU has been historicized a lot—particularly the history of the same few places in the late 1970s, and particularly CBGBs. But longstanding New Yorkers look at the whole area with McGuire glasses. It doesn’t matter how many banks or drug-store chains have masked the sites: things happened here. In this class we will read history, criticism and memoir about the sounds of downtown Manhattan over the last 150 years or so--jazz, Cantonese opera, punk, disco, No Wave, Afro-Latin music, and other kinds--learning how to define and theorize a subject as volatile and often misrepresented as urban nightlife. Our materials will include books; oral histories; films; newspaper accounts; photographs, flyers and ephemera. We will read, write, research, and interview about musical events and places that have defined our neighborhood.