Music in American history has been fundamental to identity formation because, as one scholar notes, it comprises “the deepest feelings and qualities that make a group unique. Through moving and sounding together in synchrony, people can experience a feeling of oneness with others.” This course examines how various musical genres have served as “social contracts” among audiences throughout the process of this country’s nation building process. Within America’s melting pot ideal, communities of listeners have asserted their powerful convictions about social identity through musical praxis and the “rules of engagement” surrounding the idea of “genre” that make meaning possible. From Protestant church performance practices, to minstrelsy, to Tin Pan Alley to rock and hip-hop, the social agreements of musical genres help us understand the dynamism of American identities.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A widely published author, he is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press, 2003), which was named outstanding book of the year by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (University of California Press, 2013). His next two books, a survey titled Twist and Shout: African American Music in Time, Place and Contexts, (a historical survey from slavery to the present) and Who Hears Here? Drastic Interpretations on Black Music, History and Society, a mid-career collection of essays, are both forthcoming from the University of California Press.
Dr. Ramsey taught at Tufts University before joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty. He was a Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellow at Dartmouth College, a Du Bois Institute Fellow at Harvard University, and has held visiting professorships at Princeton University and Harvard University.
Dr. Ramsey is a pianist, composer, and arranger for his Philadelphia-based band, Dr. Guy’s MusiQology. Among his recent work is “Someone Is Listening,” a commission (written with Barack Obama’s inaugural poet, Dr. Elizabeth Alexander) commemorating the 100th anniversary of the NAACP. Ramsey was also creative consultant and librettist for Ramsey Lewis’ A Proclamation of Hope: A Symphonic Poem, which premiered in 2009. His three-movement suite for voice and jazz ensemble, Art Songs in the Kingdom of Culture, premiered in February 2012 and was written in tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois.