Listening to the Gilded Age

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The United States became "modern" at the turn of the twentieth century: a primarily rural, agrarian society became an increasingly urban, industrial one that made and consumed forms of mass culture. This was a period defined by heightened immigration, the rise of corporate capitalism, and the extension of U.S. imperial power overseas. What did these years of great transformation sound like? How did people hear and listen to the world around them? This course, a discussion-based seminar, explores sound and practices of listening between 1870 and 1920 in the United States. In analyzing primary and secondary sources, we will study urban soundscapes and attempts at sound regulation, hearing and deafness, acoustics, and sound reproduction technologies. We will also explore music - popular, bourgeois, religious, and military music, for examples - as well as the making of musical genres, the commercialization of sound, aspects of performance, and organology (the science of instruments). All the while, we will consider the intersection of sound, hearing, and listening with race, gender, and class formations and the role of sound, hearing, and listening in the making of a modern America.