ARTS617/ARTS617W (Foundational Option)Music and Downtown New York 1950-70Eric CharryJanuary 9, 2016 - Feb 6, 2016
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Please note: The deadline to register for this course is January 4, 2016. Because of the early start date, the professor has already begun communicating with students about assignments
- Full Course Description
The unique confluence of musical currents in downtown New York in the 1950s and 60s was extraordinary. The intensity, diversity, and critical inclinations of the music communities that lived and worked side by side within the roughly one square mile below 14th Street were unparalleled. In this course, we will study the history and simultaneous flourishing of four distinct music communities that inhabited and shaped downtown New York culture: Euro-American experimentalists (Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Lamont Young), an African American jazz-based avant-garde (Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra), blues and folk revivalists (Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan), and Lower East Side rock groups (The Fugs, Velvet Underground). Although they had much in common, most notably a drive to create something new that critiqued, countered, or provided an alternative to mainstream American values, they also had significant, even insurmountable differences. Much of the course will be devoted to understanding their points of convergence and divergence, especially in conversation with broader currents of the time (e.g. the civil rights movement and related notions of freedom, shifting youth subcultures, and avant garde aesthetics).
We will read about and listen to recordings of a wide variety of musicians, identify aesthetic trends, and study the local industry that supported them. This will include examining the catalogs of record labels (Folkways, Vanguard, Elektra, ESP), analyzing the environments and bookings of coffee houses, clubs, and concert spaces (Village Gate, Five Spot, Gerde's Folk City, the Electric Circus, the New School), and reading primary local sources, such as the Village Voice (inaugurated in 1955), and the East Village Other (inaugurated in 1965).The foundational option of this course (ARTS617W) provides an additional level of guidance, support, and feedback. Students enrolling in the first term of study, as degree candidates, or with the intention to apply for candidacy, are encouraged to take advantage of this option. Foundation courses focus sharply on the development of the necessary tools and skills required by graduate level research.
- Faculty Bio
Eric Charry (B.M., M.M. New England Conservatory of Music; M.F.A., Ph.D. Princeton University) is professor of music. He is author of Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and editor of Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World (Indiana University Press, 2012). He has two books in progress: The Emergence of an Avant Garde in Jazz, 1956-1965 and Downtown: Music as a Cultural Force, New York in the 1950s and 60s.
- Books
Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald. 2013. The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir. New edition. Cambridge, MA:
Da Capo. ISBN: 9780306822162; ISBN-10: 0306822164 (original 2005 edition is fine too)All other readings will be on Electronic Reserve through Olin Library.