Spring 2024 Music course: Music, Climate, Environment, Empire
Open to Grad/UG from across the TTU campus, TR 12:30-1:50pm. All welcome, and please pass the word!
IOR: Dr Christopher Smith, Professor of Musicology & Director of the Vernacular Music Center
COURSE: MUHL4300-002 (58962) / MUHL5320-005 (CRN 58969): Music, Climate, Environment, Empire: a sustainable music history
Understanding 500 years of climate crisis c1500-2000 (the “Age of the Anthropocene”) through the lens of exploration, enclosure, extraction, environment, and empire.
This seminar is a one-semester course exploring empires, particularly in Europe and the New World, and the ways their cultural and environmental impact can be understood through the history of sound. In the Age of the Anthropocene (approximately 1500-present), human choices permanently changed the planet’s climate and led to a long-growing, ever-accelerating global environmental crisis We will place particular emphasis upon the interaction of people, systems, music, and ecology. Includes consideration of the works and contexts in cultivated (“classical”) and vernacular (“folk”) traditions, and what they reveal about power, energy, labor, data, and cultural meaning in the Anthropocene.
This course offers a new kind of music history that approaches familiar and unfamiliar repertoires outside of national boundaries and traditional labels ("baroque," "jazz," "rock" etc.). Its central themes are sustainability and inequality. It has a wide chronological scope, from music of the early European empires to the age of the World Wide Web. Using a series of case studies (musical postcards) we will ask how human environmental impacts (extraction of natural resources ranging from silver mining 500 years ago to electricity for server farms today), and sources of social injustice (enslavement, mass migration, war, economic exploitation) shape music history from around 1500 CE to the present.
This course will develop familiarity with a range of social, cultural, historical, economic, and biographical factors which have shaped global culture in the Age of the Anthropocene (approximately 1500CE-present), as “exploration,” exploitation, colonization, and extraction have transformed both human experience, human musical experience, and the planet itself.
Taught with the assistance of a worldwide community of scholars and activists in history, climate studies, political science, and culture studies, this TTU course provides a unique opportunity to participate in a truly international learning experience, on a series of topics—enclosure, extraction, colonialism, race, class, and climate change—of crucial and urgent contemporary importance.
This course will concentrate particularly on music and musical life in three cultural / geographical / maritime zones: regions surrounding (1) the Mediterranean, (2) the Atlantic, and (3) the Pacific. In each, we will challenge “traditional” histories and canons of music, questioning the meaning of “works,” “styles,” “contexts,” “creators,” and “audiences.” Students will be active co-researchers and discussants in this reimagination of music/sound in and through environmental history.
NO SPECIAL MUSIC TERMINOLOGY OR NOTATION SKILLS ARE REQUIRED, and the course is open to both music majors and non-music majors.
Course requirements include reading and listening, mid-term and final essay exams, and a research project (paper, website, other medium) assignment. Fulfills Grad and UG MUHL requirements
Meets Tue-Thu 12:30-1:50pm
Begins Thursday January 11 2024
Suitable for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students but does not presume any extensive formal musical knowledge; enrollment is thus welcomed from Environmental Studies, American Studies, History, Mass Communications, Anthropology, International Studies, and Political Science, as well as Music.
All materials open-access.
Facebook “event” at https://fb.me/e/7kAMIS015
More information: Dr Christopher Smith (christopher.smith@ttu.edu)
Goals:
Developing familiarity with a range of social, cultural, historical, economic, and environmental factors which have shaped music/sound and its responses to empire, enclosure, extraction, and colonialism. Emphasis upon understanding the interaction of “content” (musical structure, procedure, aesthetics versus agendas, biographies, and writing, etc) and “context” (times-places-peoples from which musical idioms and cultural phenomena originated). Enhance sensitivity to interactions of music and cultural history.
Emphasis:
This course will concentrate particularly on music and musical life in three cultural / geographical / maritime / imperial zones: regions surrounding (1) the Mediterranean, (2) the Atlantic, and (3) the Pacific. In each, we will challenge “traditional” histories and canons of music, questioning the meaning of “works,” “styles,” “contexts,” “creators,” and “audiences.” Students will be active co-researchers and discussants in this reimagination of music/sound in and through environmental history.
Instructor’s Personal Statement:
I have been a student and scholar of vernacular (e.g., “folk and traditional”) musical styles, instruments, performance practices, and cultural context since approximately 1974. Thus, I acknowledge my own positionality as white, Anglo-American, and cisgender, but nevertheless consider myself an ally of the musics of minoritized peoples and of the complex and challenging cultural experiences from which they emerge. I believe deeply in the depth, power, artistry, and profound human experience that lives within these musics and I have spent a lifetime advocating on their behalf. At the same time, I recognize that I am an outsider to minoritized experience and I vow to always seek to center unheard voices in this course’s content, practice, personnel, and outlook.
