Music & Movement in the Cultural History of New Orleans
CRN 49845 - MUHL 4300 – 005 (undergrad) / CRN 49848 - MUHL 5330 – 001 (grad)
TR 12:30-1:50 SOM M218
Course discipline: Music & Ethnic Studies
Course description:
This seminar is an intensive, topics-oriented survey of the styles, practices, and stories of diverse music traditions which met in “the Big Easy,” the French-founded, Spanish-colonized, Jefferson-purchased, Afro-Caribbean-tinged river city of New Orleans, Louisiana—a central trope in North American historical, geographical, and cultural consciousness.
Drawing on lectures, reading, listening, audio/visual sources, in-class performances, and individual research, this course provides students with an enhanced learning experience combining approaches from ethnomusicology, folklore, cultural and literary history, literature, performance studies, anthropology, geography, and more.
Through an exploration of the interaction between music and other aspects of cultural expression—talking, reading, listening, playing, and singing together—we will discover diverse indigenous, European, African, and pan-Caribbean cultural influences which met and mingled on the levees and in the streets of the Vieux Carré; the syncretic interaction of orality, memory, texts, music, dance, and the sacred; and the impact of Orleanais music throughout the New World and around the globe.
Tracing NOLA music and dance’s histories, influences, and modern permutations, and examining them on recordings, video, and in live performance, we will expand our own artistic and intellectual insight and cross-cultural sophistication. Our focal genres will include: jazz, blues, rhythm & blues, “hot music,” ragtime, Spiritual Church, vodun, Mardi Gras Indian and Social & Pleasure club Second Line, brass bands, creole opera and symphonic music, and much more; culture groups addressed will include French, English, Spanish, Cuban, Haitian, Jamaican, Choctaw, and Natchez music and movement languages. Our central topic will be the complex combinations of people, places, folkways, and social, historical, political, colonial, economic, and artistic events which have shaped multi-cultural New Orleans musical cultural identity since first colonization.
Assessment: Mid-term and final essay exams; research project (which may take either a scholarly or creative form: research paper, essay, short story, film, other multi-media, etc)
Prerequisite: PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR (christopher.smith@ttu.edu)
THIS COURSE FULFILLS THE MUSIC HISTORY REQUIREMENT. MAY ALSO BE CONTRACTED FOR HONORS CREDIT.
Texts:
* The “text” for this course will consist of a customized digital package of materials, accessed via dedicated Blackboard portal (password-protected), drawn from online resources and digital texts of all sorts. There is no charge to TTU students for use of this digital collection.
* The course will be further supported by an extensive and customized, password-protected website where will be found additional readings, audio & video files, self-guided exercises, and student assignments.
