Music and the Human

This seminar will explore contemporary debates on how music has been thought to define, divide, precede, and exceed, the category of the human. In an epoch theorized at once as a universalizing “Anthropocene,” and at other times as the socially stratifying “Capitalocene”; and in an intellectual moment in which notions of uniquely human creative capacities are questioned both by a growing literature in animal studies, and by an insistence that large language models are capable of equivalent (or analogous) creative production, must we—“humanists” in the academy—reassess our relationship to our object of study? This seminar approaches these issues through readings of classic texts and recent scholarly interventions that consider, at base level, the relationship between music and the category of the human. We will read widely from critical studies of music and evolution, from feminist theories of (sound) reproduction, from scholarship on music and racial ideology, and from post-humanist writing from animal sounds to AI, among others, to consider the place, and the future, of the “human” in the humanities.