Music, Sound, and Law

1 Course Unit

This course explores a broad array of approaches to the complex relationship between music, sound, and law. While the relationship between music and law typically focuses on matters of copyright and intellectual property, this course widens the frame, investigating how sound and listening (and the senses more broadly) help us reframe law not simply as a set of rules imposed from above, but as a dynamic set of political and cultural practices, including sonic and other sensory practices. To this end, we will investigate topics including Indigenous approaches to sound/law, oral testimony, repatriation, acoustic ecology, labor, digital mediation, automation, surveillance, and more. Drawing readings from musicology, Indigenous studies, literary studies, philosophy, critical legal studies, anthropology of law, and other scholarly areas, the course will consider not just how the law regulates music and sound but how music and sound shape law. Considering law as a site of musical interpretation—and music as a site of legal interpretation—this course will develop a critical vocabulary for exploring the relationship between sound, music, and law. Through close readings of primary legal texts and close listenings to musical works and sonic arts, students will come away from this course with the ability to interpret, compare, and critique legal arguments and procedures regarding music, copyright, and cultural property in a range of different contexts and historical eras. At the same time, students will also gain the ability to “listen about law,” interpreting cultural texts (including but not limited to music) for their political and legal significance. These twin learning objectives will be developed through the course’s two complementary research projects: (1) an analysis of a legal text regarding music or sound (e.g., Young Thug’s RICO proceedings [2024], the “Code of Indian Offenses” [1883], Bach v. Longman [1777], or The Statute of Anne [1710]); and (2) a close “legalistic” interpretation of a musical or sonic work (e.g., Raven Chacon’s American Ledger [2019], Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” [1952], Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance [1879], or François Couperin’s “Les Fastes de la grande et ancienne Mxnxtrxndxsx” [1716]). Scholarly authors to be read include: Trevor Reed, Danilo Mandic, Julia Chryssostalis, Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, Lilian Radovac, Jessica Bissett Perea, Robin R.R. Gray, Beth Piatote, Leonardo Cardoso, James E.K. Parker, Saidiya Hartman, Matthew Morrison, Veit Erlmann, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Erik Nelson, Jewel Wicker, Reyna Araibi, Anjali Vats, Dylan Robinson, Glenda Goodman, Robert A. Williams, Jr., Rennard Strickland, Jane Gaines, Peter Goodrich, Robert Cover, Sarah Deer, Katherine Leo, Maggie Blackhawk, and others. Mutually Exclusive: MUSC 3810 1 Course Unit