Analysis for the Crave by Jelly Roll Morton Rubric: Students will compose an analytical essay placing a significant work (i.e., a recording or performance), or set of works, in historical context, including a discussion of aesthetic, social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions.
The paper should consider synchronic and diachronic historical perspectives, situating the work in its particular historical moment as well as showing how it speaks to time-spanning trends of tradition, innovation, and influence. Connecting specific musical features to historical forces, your essay will examine how artists’ aesthetic choices can be understood in a historical context. Your essay should also aim to contribute to our discussion of the course’s core concerns and themes, including but not limited to: the maintenance and transformation of African core conceptual / aesthetic priorities and values, the impact of the “color line” on American music (and vice versa), the strategic embrace or militant refusal of the “mask” of minstrelsy, the book continuum, sacred and secular interplay, migration and regionalism, Afro-modernism and Black Arts movements, “racial uplift” and assimilationist efforts, interracial exchanges and coalitions, appropriation and exploitation, integrationist and anti-racist movements, black nationalism and self-determination, the long struggle for Civil Rights and economic justice.
