This Must Be The Place: American Music and American Geography

Catalog description

What does America sound like? Despite various initiatives to consolidate a uniquely "American" musical idiom---from Antonín Dvorák's "New World" Symphony, to rap-rocker Kid Rock's "We The People"---American music is gloriously diverse and polyglot, an accurate reflection of the country's myriad peoples and places. But American music does not only reflect its geography---it offers fantasies about it too. The parlor songs of the mid-19th century, for example, relied on myths of Edenic Southern plantations. We have learned what "the West" sounds like from Gene Autry, Aaron Copland, and the soundtracks to spaghetti westerns. And contemporary suburban hip-hop fans are as intimately familiar with places like the "Boogie Down" Bronx, Compton, and "Shaolin," as their urban ancestors were with the "Swanee River." Finally, American music does not only reflect and fantasize about its geography---it frequently /is/ its geography! The Missippi Delta; Tin Pan Alley; the Brill Building; Motown---these name both physical places and robust ideas of how music can be made. Through listening, reading, and writing, this class will take stock of American musical geography in all of its forms. The final project will be a collective one: a new edition of the "Stanford Undergraduate Musical Mapping of America," or "SUMMA" ,comprising individual chapters contributed by each member of the class. WIM at 4 units only.