MUSC 140: Jazz History and Appreciation

EDP, H- This course is for students with no prior music training. Students will explore the foundational elements of the jazz tradition in the United States, including African antecedents, music in African American slave culture (the ring shout, field hollers, spirituals, and work songs), and the basic structures and style periods of jazz and its culture, including ragtime, the syncopated orchestra, early New Orleans jazz, big band swing, the bebop movement, cool jazz, hard bop, the avant garde movement, jazz-rock fusion, neo-traditionalism of the 1980s, and jazz as an international musical discourse. The course will also consider the framing of jazz as a symbolic discourse in relation to ideas such as Black nationalism, democracy, and individual freedom. Students gain a practical foundation for analysis of basic elements of music (the evolution of standard jazz song forms; the role and theoretical underpinnings of improvisation) and of the historical, political and cultural context surrounding the birth and evolution of jazz, including the role of European colonialism, the American and trans-Atlantic slave economy, and the use of jazz as a tool in Civil Rights discourse.