Hist611 Music and Sound in the U.S.

Updated: May 2, 2005

Man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking,
but with all his senses.... The forming of the five senses is a labor
of the entire history of the world down to the present. (Karl Marx)

The allurement of the Sirens remains superior;
no one who hears their song can escape. (Adorno and Horkheimer)

Music is like history, completely in the present. (Tony Conrad)

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time.
There is always something to see something to hear.
In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. (John Cage)

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise,
and we chose rather desperately to live. (Ralph Ellison)

Course Description

What does it mean to study the music and sound in history? What is the relationship of sound to music, and vice versa? What is the relationship of sound and hearing to other sensory experiences? Can these be studied historically, and if so, to what effect?

This course will interrogate these questions through a series of readings and discussions about the meaning of music and sound in history. It will also take pains to link these issues to parallel or intersecting historiographies and theoretical debates. Whether music and sound are functioning as communication, ritual, aethetic expression, or psychological outlet, they are situated in historically specific circumstances, and therefore can be understood in relation to the social organization and dominant ideology of the moment. Bentham's prison design incorporated not only an apparatus of visual surveillance; it was also outfitted with a network of listening tubes. That sound--and by some measures, music--are ephemeral is what makes the nature of this subject both challenging and potentially so rewarding.

Requirements

1. Reading. Although the reading load for this course isn't necessarily heavier than for any other graduate course, the fact remains that it's a lot. The smarter you read, the better use you will make of your time: carefully peruse the front matter and back matter; place a book in context; keep your eye on its argument and don't get lost in the details. And don't spend all your available time scrutinizing the first three chapters and totally neglect the last four.

2. Lead discussion. Each student will be asked to lead one discussion, including preparation of a set of discussion questions. (15%)

3. Reading summaries. Six times over the semester, students are asked to prepare written summaries, no more than two pages long, of a week's readings, to be emailed to me twenty-four hours before class. You choose which six weeks you write on, but three should be in the first half of the semester and three in the second. These papers will not be graded individually, though I will read them closely and offer comments. (30%)

4. Short paper. You will be asked to write a short paper (6-8 pages) researching sound in an online fulltext database, e.g. NYT, HarpWeek, Pennsylvania Gazette, etc., about a period before 1900. Due March 16. A full description of the assignment is available here.

5. Long paper. Either a research prospectus or a historiographic essay. Due at the end of the semester. (35%) A full description of the paper assignment is available here.

Books

The following books have been ordered at the UD bookstore:

William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (1867)

Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Noise, trans. Brian Massumi (U of Minnesota Press, 1985)

Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (U of Calif. Press, 2002)

Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago, 2003)

R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny, [1977,] 1994)

Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000)

Suzanne Smith, Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Harvard, 2001)

Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003)

Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (MIT, 2002)

Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard, 1999)

I have also ordered a few copies of Richard Crawford's America's Musical Life: A History (Norton, 2001). This one is recommended, not required. It's a big book, probably expensive, and we're not going to read it explicitly, but it's currently the premier synthesis of American musical history written by one of the field's most influential scholars.

Finally, one book -- Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (Knopf, 1987; U of Calif Press, 1994) -- is out of print. However, there are many used copies available online, via abe.com, addall.com, and of course amazon.com. Also, the 1987 and 1994 editions have different subtitles, but they are the same book.

Course schedule

Feb. 9 - Introduction Alain Corbin, "A History and Anthopology of the Senses," in Time, Desire, and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses, trans. Jean Birrell (n.p.: Polity, 1995), 181-95. - Click here Feb. 16 - The Soundscape Anthony Synnott, "Puzzling over the Senses: From Plato to Marx," in The Varieties of Sensory Experience, ed. David Howes (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1991), 61-78 - Click here Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003), 1-21 - Click here R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny, [1977,] 1994) - preface, intro., ch. 1-7, 13, 19 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard UP, [1942,] 1982), 423-36 - Click here Related text: Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (Columbia UP, 1998) Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Cornell UP, 2003) Feb. 23 - Listening and Hearing I: The Enlightenment Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) Related text: Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (Anchor, 2003)	Saint Jerome Hearing the Trumpet of the Last Judgment Jusepe de Ribera (Spanish, 1591–1652) (Courtesy: Metropolitican Museum of Art)
Mar. 2 - Listening and Hearing II: Technology Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003) Related text: Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effect on Music (Verso, 1995) Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, 1999) Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, 1999) William Howland Kenney, The Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory (Oxford 1999) James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890-1950 (Johns Hopkins, 1996) Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (Yale, 2000) Mar. 9 - Acoustic Modernity Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (MIT, 2002) Related texts: Karin Bijsterveld, "The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism in European and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns, 1900-49," Social Studies of Science 31 (Feb. 2001), 37-70. - Click here Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises" (1913) - Click here Mar. 16 - Music and Social Order Short paper due - the assignment is available here (For your edification, I am also making available a short but extremely helpful guide to effective prose writing, distributed by the Yale Univ. history department. Click here.) Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken, 1969), 217-51 - available here Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Noise, trans. Brian Massumi (U of Minnesota Press, 1985) Related texts: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935-38, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard UP, 2002) Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version," trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard UP, 2003) Mar. 23 - The Social Production of Cultural Authority Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (Knopf, 1987; U of Calif Press, 1994) Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869) [excerpts], from Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2d ed., ed. John Storey (Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 1998), 7-12 - click here Neil Harris, “John Philip Sousa and the Culture of Reassurance,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (U of Chicago Press, 1990), 198-232 - click here Related texts: Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Origins of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard, 1988) MacDonal Smith Moore, Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity (Indiana UP, 1985) Barbara Tischler, An American Music: The Search for an American Musical Identity (Oxford, 1986) Mar. 30 - Spring break	From an Edison Phonograph ad, 1913 There can be no music without ideology. - Dimitri Shostakovich
Apr. 6 - "Black" Music and America William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (1867) Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago, 2003), esp. chaps. 2-4 W. E. B. Du Bois, "Of the Sorrow Songs," in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) - Click here Related text: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993), esp. ch. 3 Lawrence Levine, "Jazz and American Culture," in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (Oxford UP, 1993), 172-88 Apr. 13 - The Culture Industries Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (Routledge, 1993), 29-43 - click here Theodor Adorno with George Simpson, "On Popular Music" (1941) in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Univ. of California Press, 2002), 288-317 - click here Theodor Adorno, "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938) in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Univ. of California Press, 2002), 288-317 - click here Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of American Popular Music (1930, repr. 1961), 197-233 - click here Simon Frith, "Why Do Songs Have Words?" in Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (Routledge, 1988) - click here Related texts: Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry Reconsidered," New German Critique (Fall 1975), 12-19 - click here David Riesman, "Listening to Popular Music," in On Record: Rock , Pop & the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (Pantheon, 1990), 5-13 Apr. 20 - Locating Power in Popular Music * FYI (following our discussion on 4/13): click here for a taste of Schoenberg. Excerpt is from Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 - I. Leicht, zart . Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the 'Popular,'" in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 1998), 442-53 - click here George Lipsitz, "Against the Wind: Dialogic Aspects of Rock and Roll," in Time Passages: Collective Memory in American Popular Culture (U of Minnesota Press, 1990), 99-132 - click here George Lipsitz, "Land of a Thousand Dances: Youth, Minorities, and the Rise of Rock and Roll," in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. Lary May (U of Chicago Press, 1989), 267-84 - click here T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities" Amer. Historical Rev. 90 (June 1985): 567-93 - click here (via JSTOR - if link doesn't work, you might have to call up the article yourself) Apr. 27 - Listening to Jazz Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (U of Calif. Press, 2002) Related texts: Scott Deveaux, "Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography," Black American Literature Forum 25 (Autumn 1991), 525-60 Catherine Gunther Kodat, "Conversing with Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, Jazz" American Quarterly 55 (Mar. 2003): 1-28 Robert O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Grifffin, eds., Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia UP, 2004) Krin Gabbard, "Introduction: The Jazz Canon and Its Consequences," in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Duke UP, 1995) Ted Vincent, Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Age of Jazz (Pluto, 1995) Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture (Routledge, 1998) Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (U of Chicago Press, 1997)	Elvis and B.B. King
May 4 - Music / Gender / Power Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota, 1991), 1-31 - click here Hazel Carby, "It Jus' Be's Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues," in Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, ed. Robert Walser (Oxford, 1999), 351-64 - click here Sherrie Tucker, "Nobody's Sweethearts: Gender, Race, Jazz, and the Darlings of Rhythm," American Music 16 (Autumn 1998), 255-288 - click here (via JSTOR) Gayle Wald, "From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover," American Quarterly 55 (Sep. 2003), 387-416 - click here (available online via Project Muse, accessible through the UD Libraries' Databases) May 11 - Political Econony Suzanne Smith, Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Harvard, 2001) Nelson George, "Redemption Songs in the Age of Corporations (1971-75)" in The Death of Rhythm and Blues (Pantheon, 1988), 121-46 - click here Related Texts: David Sanjek, "Tell Me Something I Don't Already Know: The Harvard Report on Soul Music Revisited," in Rhythm & Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (Akashic, 2002), 59-76 Economic Development Department, NAACP, "The Discordant Sound of Music: A Report on the Record Industry (1987)," in Rhythm & Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (Akashic, 2002), 44-58 David Suisman, "Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music," J. of American History 90 (March 2004), 1295-1324. May 18 - Instrumental Technology Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard, 1999) Related texts: Paul Theberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Wesleyan, 1997) Timothy Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, Culture (Routledge, 2001) Hans-Joachim Bruan, Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (JHU, 2002) Craig Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940 (UNC, 1989)