Music and Society--New!

Hi folks. So. I’m going to change the blog line-up a bit this week—I hope you all don’t mind. Here’s the whole week (January 19-23):

Monday—no blog assignment; go do something worthwhile for Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Tuesday—Music and Society Entry
Wednesday—no Blog assignment
Thursday—Comments
Friday—Cool Stuff!

“Comments” and “Cool Stuff” should be fairly easy to understand by now. For this week’s Comments, any Blog entries since last week’s Comments are fair game. This week’s Cool Stuff can encompass the Blues or any of thee three Asian cultures we’ll be covering this week (India, Indonesia, and Japan). Music and Society, however, is new. Originally, this week’s Blog Entries were to be on Music and Work and Music and Family. I’ve decided that one blog entry will be enough for this week, given that you need to be working on your Final Projects. And I’ve just finished watching the opening ceremonies for the Presidential Inauguration, which has inspired the Music in Society topic.

For Music and Society, I want you to think about and research the ways in which Music has influenced or been directly influenced by various aspects of the larger society—a government, a ruler, a rebel force, a minority group, etc. Pick a two or three examples of how Music and Society have interacted and blog about them. Some possible topics might be Control of Music by the Soviet Government, Isorhythmic Motets in the French Middle Ages, Marian Anderson and the DAR, Protest Music in the 1960s, Spirituals and the Underground Railroad, the history of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” or, most recently, the videos of Will.i.am and Obama Girl or the spectacular Bass stylings of Mike Huckabee . There are many, many topics along these lines—these are just a few that come to mind (my mind, of course—yours is probably much different). Yes, you may venture back into Western Art music for this topic, as you’ll be treating it in an Ethnomusicological fashion.

I do realize that this topic is a bit of a departure from our previous blog entries. In the past, I’ve mostly had you relate Ethnomusicological topics to your own lives, and most of you won’t have had tons of direct experience as to how Music and Society have interacted. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Inauguration Day are coming up, though, and I decided that this would be a fit way to observe those two occasions. I would expect that you’d need to do at least a bit of web research—you might start by checking out the Wikipedia entries on “Music and Politics” or “Protest Songs. “ And incidentally, I’m sure it’s only a matter of minutes before someone posts the video of Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing “This Land is Your Land” at the end of today’s ceremonies on YouTube. Go find it—it’s incredible.