Music and Modernity in the Americas

Harvard FAS

This seminar explores how music not only reflected but also shaped history and culture in the Americas during the twentieth century. Turning to writers, artists, and intellectuals who treated music as a tool for understanding the upheavals of modernity—rapid urbanization, mass media and mass migration, as well as changing conceptions of racial, national, and class identities—we will examine how the music of the Americas entered the modern imagination. How did new musical forms influence…