Rock & Revolution
Online presentation with music and Q&A
May 20, 2021 4pm ET
How did the “revolutionary” music of the late 1960s and early 1970s express and influence the turbulent events and politics of those days, and why is it still relevant today? We asked music historian Angharad Davis, creator and teacher of “Music and Revolution” at Yale this year, to guide us on a knowledgeable tour.
Sponsored by Yale Class of 1974
Alec Haverstick and Sharyar Aziz, co-secretaries
Harvey Kent, treasurer
Produced by Kevin McKean and Stu Rohrer
Special thanks to Wayne Willis, Jennifer Julier and our fellow class officers and friends from the Classes of 1967 through 1975.
About our guide: Angharad Davis
Angharad Davis is a lecturer in the Yale University Department of Music, where she completed her PhD in music history in 2019. During her two years lecturing at Yale, Davis redeveloped the undergraduate music course “Listening to Music,” and also designed and taught courses on music and morality; race, narrative, and the American folk revival; and screen musicals. The Yale Alumni talk “Rock & Revolution” draws on ideas from a first-year seminar she created and taught this spring, entitled “Music and Revolution in the Americas, 1920-2020.” The course was inspired by the recent resurgence of radical politics among young people, and covered topics ranging from folk-oriented strike songs of the Great Depression to contemporary hip hop tracks that affirm Black Lives Matter.
Born in Australia, Davis had studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she won the university medal for an honors thesis on birdsong in late twentieth century music – as well as “bemused looks,” she says, for a master’s thesis on the work of Peter Schickele (aka P.D.Q. Bach). These days, her research interests include American music; the intersections of art, science and technology in Machine Age culture; the power plays bound up in “masculinist modernisms;” and musical evocations of landscape and the environment.