Music and Politics

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.