Course Description
Study the roles of music in campaigns for equal rights throughout the history of the United States.
Learning Outcomes
- Define and use music terminology relevant to a variety of musical styles and genres that have been used to raise awareness for social injustice.
- Apply close listening skills relevant to the description of a variety of musics.
- Interpret class, race, gender, and other intersectional social identity categories relevant to music in social justice contexts.
- Describe historical context of musical works and performances studied as artifacts of equal rights campaigns.
- Describe the legacy of historical uses of music in later periods, including the present.
- Interpret the unique social impacts of participatory singing, concert performances, recordings, and digital media on the organization and unification of social movements.
- Analyze music as one of the social processes that constructs ethnicity, race, and other intersectional aspects of identity.
- Critique power imbalances in American society that influence and are influenced by music making.
- Apply knowledge of diversity to analyze one’s own identity and place in U. S. culture
- Reflect on one’s own role and relationship to music for equal rights campaigns in order to demonstrate an understanding of social responsibility and civic engagement.
Schedule of Course Study Topics
Unit I. Introduction to Music as Culture & Sound
Introductions and Defining Our Topic of Study
Use of Interpretive Lenses of Race and Gender
Communicating About Musical Sound
Considering Today’s Equal Rights Music
Unit II: Singing As Collective Action: The Case of Organized Labor
Solidarity Forever
Music and The Popular Front
Listening for the Legacy of the Little Red Songbook
Unit III. Music and Abolition in Nineteenth Century
Uncovering the (Singing) Voices of the Earliest Abolitionists
Musical Propaganda and Blackface Minstrelsy
Hutchinson Singers, Joshua Simpson, and E.T. Greenfield
Minstrelsy and Abolition today?
Unit IV. Music of African American Civil Rights Campaigns in the Twentieth Century
Marion Anderson’s Reluctant Activism
Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as Protest Song
Anthems of the 1960s
Nina Simone and Black Power
Jazz as Protest
Funk as Protest
Hip Hop Roots and #Black Lives Matter
Unit V. Identity Intersections and Spread of “Rights” Movements
Asian American Movement of 1970s
Music and Immigrant Rights
Red Power and Indigenous Rights
Unit VI. Women’s Suffrage and Musical Feminisms
Nineteenth Century Roots of Suffrage Movement
Singing for “Women’s Lib” in the 1960s and 1970s
Riot Grrls and Hip Hop Feminism
Unit VII. Music and LGBTQ+ Rights
Disco Anthems for Pride, Rights and Resilience
The Social and Cultural Work of LGBTQ Choruses