MUSC 200 Music and Disease
In this course, we will study the relationship between music, sound, and disease, with a special focus on tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19 in Europe and the United States. We will study how the disabling effects of disease affect musical performance (singing and playing), and how composers and performers have responded to and represented disease. Throughout, we will be alert to how differences in these responses are occasioned by historical time, geographical place, culture, race, sex, and class. We will begin in the early nineteenth century with the invention of the stethoscope, which turned close listening to the body as the principal means of detecting tuberculosis. The second unit of the course will study the disabling effects of TB on the composer-pianist Fryderyk Chopin, how he developed a piano method to accommodate that disability, and how the public perceived his music because of his illness. The third unit will study nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century musical stage representations of tuberculosis—the operas La Traviata, The Tales of Hoffmann, La Bohème, and The Fall of the House of Usher—and consider them in terms of gender, class, health care, and moral codes. The fourth unit will address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Here we will focus on Diamanda Galas’s Plague Mass, the AIDS Quilt Songbook, and Jonathan Larson's Rent as political, cultural, and moral arguments. The fifth and final unit will study the musical responses to COVID-19, including the effects of COVID-19 on musicians and music-making, especially singing, and the wide range of public music performed by everyday citizens to honor frontline workers. By ending the course with frontline workers, we will examine the societal inequities that pandemics underscore and how music can give voice to those marginalized and disproportionately affected by a pandemic. Throughout the course, we will chart the vexed understanding of the relationship between mental and physical health, particularly in the presence of debilitating chronic disease.
This course is part of the Mellon Humanities for Just Communities initiative.
Core Requirements Met
- Fine Arts
- Global Connections