MUS 291 - Women and Performance in 1960s Popular Music

If U.S. popular music in the 1950s exhibited a relatively narrow bandwidth of performances by women, the possibilities-in sound, style, approach, and affect-expanded dramatically in the 1960s. This course studies how women popular musicians in the sixties, along with their audiences, enacted these diversifying musical performances. Particularly influential for this multiplication of performance modes were seminal developments in second-wave feminism, the cresting civil rights movement, sixties counterculture, and transformations within the music industry. Students will cultivate skills for close listening to recordings and analysis of musical style, and will read literature by a range of scholars thinking through musicology, media studies, U.S. history, African American studies, feminist theory, and performance studies about such artists as Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, the Supremes, Astrid Gilberto, Barbra Streisand, Loretta Lynn, Miriam Makeba, and others. We will also consider how musical performances by 1960s women were mobilized intersectionally with racial, ethnic, class, political, and geographic identities.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2024-25
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).