Music & Politics in the Classroom: Music, Politics and Protest

Abstract

This essay is part of the “Music and Politics in the Classroom” series in the journal Music and Politics. The series is designed to communicate different approaches to teaching classes around the aforementioned topic. My course, “Music, Politics and Protest,” is structured for non-majors and as such is a general education lecture course. My approach to this class is not musicological but rather inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural—in examining music and its relationship to politics and protest, we have occasion to examine political and cultural theory in the context of U.S. and South Asian history. This approach is based on the fact that I am an anthropologist by training specializing in Hindustani music as well as by the fact that the music department at the University of California, Santa Cruz is in our second year of a Ph.D program in cross-cultural musicology, a program that emphasizes both inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to musical traditions. In particular, this course covers four domains where music intersects the political: (1) music as an agent of change, (2) music as an implicit or explicit commentary on power, (3) music and the politics of spirituality, and (4) music as a mirror of historical, political and cultural change.