Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Melissa Castillo-Garsow
Meeting time: Monday, 3-5
This course explores the history of race relations, civil rights, and youth cultures post WWII through the lens of music history. Although overtime, African American contributions to American Music have become more and more recognized, Latino contributions to popular music in the United States have mostly been relegated to the margins of a narrative dominat-ed by an overly black and white view of musical history. Latin music is often portrayed as an exotic resource for "American" musicians. Often seen as purely foreign music, this course turns that perspective on its head. We will document the roles of U.S. Latino musicians as interpreters of Latin American genres, as well as their roles as innovators within genres normally considered non-Latino music: R&B, jazz, Rock & Roll, country/western, punk and hip hop. In this course, we examine how the sensibility and musical creativity of urban youth, in very different historical periods, inspired musical revolutions which transformed the tastes of entire generations, crossing boundaries of race, gender, nation and social class.