Latin American Music and Globalization

This course offers a history of Latin American and Caribbean musical practices through several waves of globalization. It covers colonial, modern, and current musical trends that illuminate large cultural, economic, demographic, and ideological aspects of this region. Students will develop individual papers dealing with the circulation of music across national and cultural boundaries within and beyond this region.

The course teaches how to elaborate each component of a paper (topic, research question, hypothesis, sources, writing plan, etc.). It provides an interdisciplinary convergence of history, area studies, and music. Students will learn, through reading and listening, about both famous and obliterated histories of popular, folk, classical, opera, and urban music, diasporic styles, entertainment corporations, markets, technology, state policies, pedagogy, cinema, musicology, nationalism, and musical diplomacy.

Each meeting explores musical pieces to enable an active dialogue between history and sound. “Musical practices” are approached in their material, economic, public policy, aesthetic discourses, identity, and political forms. Musical training is welcome, but not necessary to take this class. The course satisfies requirements in Humanities, Race and Ethnicity, History, Music, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies.