Course description

Instructor: Karl Hall

Number of credits: 2 

Course level: MA

Time: Fridays, 13:30-15:10.  

Place: C-210. If, due to illness, you need online access (with prior permission), this is the Zoom link. 

Prerequisites: None: no background in history of science or musicology or acoustics is assumed. 

Course aims: 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. 

With each passing week in the seminar we will try to incorporate more readings from Central and Eastern Europe. Sometimes the choice is overdetermined, in the sense that the CEE text is already a constituent part of a notional Western canon with which the student needs to familiarize herself. Yet the choice of CEE texts will at times be aimed at forcing us to look beyond a perceived canon, or at least test its bounds. There is a growing body of secondary literature on cultures of listening, and we should both use our own CEE expertise to enrich it as well as to offer critiques. The rise of new spaces and new technologies for listening to music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will in turn permit us to look afresh at the subjectivities of musical taste and consumption. Radio transmission, electronic amplification, and rapidly growing urban spaces then lead us naturally to the final theme of the course: noise. What it was in subjective and objective terms, how it was quantified, how it became an object of (cultural) politics, how it could be contained: this will complete our repertoire.

Note on primary sources: Each session has a default primary source in English available to everyone. Where sources permit in a given session, the course includes supplementary Central and East European views of the topics under discussion in the original languages, and these Czech, Hungarian, Polish, etc., options may be substituted as desired.

Learning outcomes: Students will sharpen their vocabulary for employing the techniques of cultural history. They will be introduced to aural concepts essential to the history of the senses; basic musicological concepts relevant to general cultural history; and basic acoustic concepts relevant to the urban history of aural spaces.

Assessment: One presentation in class: 20%; soundscape exercise: 15%; review essay: 50%; general class participation: 15%.

Review essay: 8-9 double-spaced pages (12-point font, no fiddling with the default margins; Chicago Manual of Style, full notes). Topics chosen in consultation with the instructor. This is not a proper research paper, but simply an opportunity for the student to orient themselves in the secondary literature on a suitable topic.  

Soundscape exercise: TBA (resources permitting, this will be a chance to "read" a musical space of your choice)

Deadline: December 22