I'm a cultural historian, you're a cultural historian, we are all cultural historians. The hermeneutic techniques that we apply to literary, political, or religious texts have become the common currency of the profession, and these in turn enable us to build up the corpus of conventions, practices, transmissions, receptions, mental habits, social relations, and even bodily gestures that can feed into works of cultural history. Anthropology, literary theory, and philosophy have all become methodological resources in varying degrees for the aspiring cultural historian. In this course we will study a complex of phenomena that can help us sharpen our own sensibilities about the proper bounds of cultural history (and perhaps even our logocentrism). Although sound as such may seem too generic and natural to tackle with the techniques of cultural history, it, too, is part of material culture, and understanding its mechanisms of production and perception is indispensable to joining the larger professional conversation about the history of the senses, which so often privileges visuality.
Music offers a further set of challenges. While it may be more obviously the product of cultural signs and conventions than mere sound, music-making is a constant rebuke to our modern tendency to draw strong distinctions between Nature and Culture. Ordinarily we cultural historians might be inclined to leave the "technical" aspects of that interface to musicologists, and simply focus on popular audiences, musical institutions, and resonances with broader cultural politics. The present instructor is not a musicologist, but still regards this seminar as a safe space for laymen to learn more than they might otherwise about the "natural" constraints on music composition, and the ways in which historically durable musical conventions or styles can be (de)naturalized in service to cultural ends. By the same token, we will learn to recognize the historical musicologist's tendency to adopt the synoptic view, and take that as cautionary in our own struggles with the antinomies of text/context. That is to say, our search for the coherence and unity of a musical work as object of Culture should not lead us to reinstantiate them in our own analyses.
- Instructor: Karl Hall