BHUM 17A29 - Opera and Politics in the United States

BHUM 17A29 · Semestre de printemps 2025-2026

Informations

This course aims to examine the relation between music and American politics in that most refined of art forms:

Opera.

The course will introduce students to the history of American opera focusing on 20 th and 21 st century works,

composers and performers. The aim of this course is to explore the way politics inspired American composers to

highlight the circulation of ideas and the political roles of art and the artists. Following different types of documents

(video extracts, scholarly and press articles, book chapters, photographs and reports), we will closely examine three

main topics: the American political resonances in the works of American composers and especially John Adams, the

effects of the Black Lives Matter movement on the world of opera and focusing on the recent works of Terence

Blanchard and Anthony Davis, and American opera as a cultural soft power since americanization of the genre.

No previous knowledge of opera or musical skills needed for this course.

Oral participation (discussing, reading, etc.)10%

Oral presentation25%

Essay (25%) Final essay40%

- Anastasia Tsioulcas, “Prison choirs sing in a reboot of Beethoven's opera about unjust incarceration”, NPR, February 19, 2022.
- John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History, Yale University Press, 1993.

Emprunter
- Joshua Barone, “Beethoven Returns for the Age of Black Lives Matter”, The New York Times, february 14, 2022.
- Joshua Barone, “How Opera Inspired Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’, The New York Times, September 2017.
- Joshua Barone, “Opera Can No Longer Ignore Its Race Problem”, The New York Times, July 16, 2020.
- Joshua Barone, “The Metropolitan Opera Hires Its First Chief Diversity Officer”, The New York Times, Janvier 25, 2021.
- Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow. The Emergence of Cultural Hierachy in America, Cambridge/Mass Harvard University Press, 1988.

Emprunter
- Susan Feder, Anthony McGill,“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Racial Injustice in the Classical Music Professions: A Call to Action”, in Michael Beckerman, Paul Boghossian, Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges, Norton & Company, 2022
- Zachary Woolfe, “A Black Composer Finally Arrives at the Metropolitan Opera”, The New York Times, September 23, 2021.

N° d'UP	Type d'UP	Unités pédagogiques	Enseignants	Nombre d'heures	Crédits
56026	Conférence	Opera and Politics in the United States	Sandrine COYEZ	12	3
56027	Conférence	Opera and Politics in the United States	—	12	3