Early American Musics and Concepts of Nation, MUNM 24100, will be offered in Fall 2024. This course has a CA designation and a Diversity attribute. It will be offered Tuesday and Thursday from 9:25 – 10:40 am and is a 3-credit course. The course will be taught by Prof. Maya Cunningham, the Pre-Doctoral Diversity Scholar in the Department of Music Theory, History, and Composition.
Course description:
This course will explore early African American musics and group self-knowledge during the Antebellum and Reconstruction periods that indicate early African American conceptions of nation. We will begin with understanding royal court music traditions of kingdoms of which Africans brought to British North America were citizens, and their indigenous conceptions of national identity. These areas are Senegambia, the Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Bight of Benin.We will explore the formation of African American culture that developed through African American English, religion and musical practices. We will engage in a close study of the Hush Arbor tradition, African American spirituals, ring shouts and early African American organology (the study of musical instruments) to understand early African American group knowledge that indicated an early national identity as a‘nation within a nation.’
We will read primary sources including slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano and Omar Said, as well as the biography of Harriet Tubman, as ethnographic sources of early African American musical practices likejunkanuand code songs used for secret messaging. We will also examine post-antebellum ballads, prison gang work songs, blues, and congregational music to understand the formation of post-Civil War African American cultural identity during the Reconstruction Period. This course will also engage primary oral history sources like the WPA Slave Narratives, other oral histories, music recordings, documentaries, and course guests, as well as secondary ethnomusicological and Africana Studies scholarship.
Topics:
- Early African American history
- Pre-colonial West, West Central and East African societies
- Music of pre-colonial West, West Central and East African Royal Courts
- Folkloric or common music traditional musics of West, West Central and East Africa
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
- Middle Passage
- Development of early African American music forms and expressive culture: spirituals, worksongs, ring shouts, festivals, instrumental musics
- Development of early ante-bellum African American group identity, how it developed through music, language and religion
- Development post-bellum African American group identity through blues, sacred congregational musics, worksongs, ballads and other forms.
About Prof. Cunningham
Maya Cunninghamholds a Bachelor of Music degree in jazz studies (voice) from Howard University and a Master of Arts degree in jazz performance from Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. A scholar of Black music and culture, she has received an MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park and an MA in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is pursuing a PhD at the WEB Du Bois Institute for African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, while serving as a Lecturer in music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The title of her dissertation is Jazz Malungaje: Understanding the Africanity of African American Jazz Through the Lens of the South African Jazz Tradition. She is also a Fulbright scholar and Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow.