I enjoy teaching interdisciplinary courses across the fields of American studies, African American studies, cultural history, and musicology. Here are the titles and descriptions for a few of my recent courses:
Music and Its Makers
This course will introduce students to interdisciplinary music studies by focusing on the people who create musical meaning: performers, composers, listeners, patrons, writers, and more. As we analyze significant musical works, we will also learn about the broader cultural, historical, and social contexts in which they appeared, and the people involved in their creation – including women and people of color, who are often minimized in discussions of music history. Historical examples will be juxtaposed with contemporary musical works from an array of genres, allowing students to compare today’s musical cultures to past ones. Students will also analyze the role of music in their own lives.
Topics in African American Music
This course examines the immensely varied and rich musical traditions created by African Americans from 1619 to the present. “African American music” is a capacious and contested category which encompasses genres from spirituals to symphonies, from jazz to opera, from gospel to rap. We will study these musical traditions in relation to other creative and intellectual pursuits, including literature and visual art, while also considering music’s social and political significance. Traversing an array of genres and time periods, we will consider major issues in the history of African American music including the politics of representation, appropriation, property, and authenticity; the contributions of Black women as performers and creators; and the global roots and diasporic routes of Black music and musicians.
Music, Gender, and Power
This course explores the significance of gender across various musical traditions, from Western classical music to global popular and vernacular styles. It examines how gender – like other markers of identity – is a vector of political and social power, and it considers music’s role in both reflecting and shaping that power. To do this work, we will pair musical case studies with theoretical texts from women’s and gender studies. Topics include the musical construction of masculinity and femininity; the relationship between music and queer and trans identities; and the role of music in feminist movements past and present. Students will have the opportunity to complete hands-on research projects.
Sound and Color: Music, Race, and U.S. Cultural Politics
Although race is often presumed to be a visual phenomenon, it is also created and produced through sound. But what does race sound like? What might we learn when we attune our ears to the music and noise that race makes in popular music, on the stage, and in literature? How can texts like songs, films, and novels both reinforce and challenge cultural hierarchies and arrangements of social power? This course explores the sonification of race and the racialization of sound, music, and noise in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. The first unit will consider examples ranging from blackface minstrel shows (the nineteenth-century nation’s most popular form of entertainment) to the noise ordinances that governed sonic life in urban immigrant neighborhoods at the turn of the twentieth century. In the second unit, we turn our attention to two important postwar genres, the novel and the Broadway musical. Investigating works like Ralph Ellison’s majestic Invisible Man (1952) and shows like West Side Story (1957), we’ll ask how mid-century artists and writers re-imagined the relationship between race and sound. The third and final unit focuses upon a selection of contemporary case studies; for instance, Pixar’s Soul (2020), or the Afrofuturist worldmaking of Janelle Monáe. As we delve into these cultural texts, we’ll listen closely to how they represent race in relation to other analytical categories such as gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship. In addition to developing skills in interdisciplinary analysis and close reading, students will also have the opportunity to pursue creative projects.
Music and Resistance in the Modern United States
While music is often touted as a “universal language” that generates social harmony, it also expresses dissent from and resistance to the status quo. This course asks how music works as a type of social and political resistance, and what aesthetic and formal qualities enable it to do so. We will explore the relationship between music and resistance in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States, in contexts that range from Ma Rainey’s defiant blues songs to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical Hamilton. Focusing especially (but not exclusively) on African American music and musicians, we will consider how music informs modes of resistance tied to race, class, gender, and sexuality. In addition to asking how music can resist extant arrangements of power, we will also consider the types of futures that music can imagine. By examining an array of historical sources, theoretical texts, and sonic archives, students will develop the ability to analyze music from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective. There will also be opportunities for hands-on and creative projects.
Lucy Caplan 