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"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 DescriptionGeneral Education Requirements: Interpreting Arts and Media (IM)
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We all do it in varying degrees. We listen with our ears or our bodies. We are touched by music and have our own relationships 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 students with tools to define and practice different kinds of listening. Then, students bring those listening skills to literary texts in print and audio recordings. Course materials include folklore, essays, short stories, novels, poetry, song lyrics, songs, and more, primarily by African American writers. Our study of literary and audio texts begins in the 1880s, right around the birth and mass accessibility of modern sound recording and reproduction technologies, and continues on through the mid to late century.
The course asks participants to consider:
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?