"Listening and Music" is a special topics course supported by a generous grant from UCSC's Porter college. The course is intended to encourage undergraduate students to explore areas of study traditionally associated with Porter and its curriculum: art as a form of inquiry and thinking, public art, art and politics, art and self-expression, etc. It fulfills the UCSC General Education Requirement "Interpreting Arts and Media" by "focus[ing] on the practice, analysis, interpretation, and / or history of one or more artistic or mass media (media in which non-textual materials play primary roles).

Course Description

Critical Approaches: Media (M), Power and Subjectivities (P)
General Education Requirements: Interpreting Arts and Media (IM)

We all do it in varying degrees. We listen with our ears or our bodies. We are touched by music and have our own relationship to it. We encounter complex ideas about listening and music in the literature and cultures that we engage or study, though we may lack the tools or language to talk about them. This course recognizes that gap and will provide you with some tools to listen and to listen to sound and music in the literature and history of the modern African American experience. It provides a framework for deepening your engagement with African American literature and culture and / or for engaging productively with other aural cultures in future work.

The course is divided into two units: listening (how we listen), then music (specific sounds that we listen to). As we develop a critical vocabulary and practices in listening, we will survey two primary sonic media, a body of print literature and audio, for how they listen, why they listen, and what they listen to in a variety of genres: folktale, poetry, novel, short story, nonfiction, film, opera, drama, recordings and songs. Doing so provides a foundation for identifying and analyzing 19th/20th-century Black musical genres, artists, and sound in specific historical moments and literary texts. Scheduled readings will be paired with approximately 5 minutes of audio selections, both for analysis.

The course asks participants to consider:

• What does it mean to listen and how can I understand my listening better?
• How can I listen to a printed text or read sound closely?
• How is aurality entangled with literary movements, form, aesthetics, and materials?
• What did some African American cultures sound (like) from 1880-1960?
• How did 20th-century African American writers listen, record, and why?
• How do these musics and listening practices relate to my personal listening practices?