MUS057 PO - Listening to Queer Voices: Radical Identities, Performance, and Transgression in Music, from Hildegard to House

When Offered: Fall 2021.
Instructor(s): M. Bandy
Through directed reading, listening, and in-depth group discussion, this class examines the lives and works of a wide range of musicians and composers who transcend, evade, or otherwise subvert established norms of gender and sexuality in their given context. More than presenting a series of individual case studies, we seek and forge pathways of understanding across time period and national divide, to articulate ways in which queerness, here broadly defined as the experience of 'otherness' in gender or sexual identity relative to societal expectations, inevitably enlivens and drives forward the very cultures and characters that ostensibly serve to suppress it. In mapping European and American music's queer underground, we delve into provocative topics like operatic castration practices, eroticism in convent music, synthesizers and transgender embodiment, David Bowie's and Prince's gender-fluid personae, LGBTQIA+ roots of Disco and House (EDM), and more. Open to all students; no prior knowledge of music theory or notation required.
Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 1

This course information is from the 2023-2024 Pomona College Catalog. View this catalog.

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