Music and American Night Life

Catalog description

Where does music happen? Who patronizes these places? How do these social scenes drive change in music and our cities? In this course, we examine contexts of American nightlife from the 1920s to through the 1980s and look to the ways they have shaped musical creativity, entertainment industries, labor movements, civil rights struggles, urban development, and notions of gender. Lectures and discussions will focus on recent scholarship of nightlife that applies methods and frameworks of cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology. Students will have the opportunity to expand their knowledge of key social science terms and apply ethnographic perspectives to music as a social process.