Music and Politics is an ethnomusicology course that examines the interrelationship
between society, power, and musical performance. For the purpose of this course,
politics is conceived broadly, as the social, governmental, and economic
factors that inform public culture within the context of the nation-state. While
music is often romanticized as a universal medium that can bring people
together, this course takes a more realist approach in order better understand
how music, sound, and performance are often used as a means of subjugation,
coercion, propaganda, as well as resistance in milieus with discrepant power
dynamics. Exploring war, social movements, and radical political subcultures afford
us the opportunity to examine the ways in which discrepant power dynamics manifest
through cultural performance.
- Trainer/in: Max Jack