Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana’s Angola Prison (Jazz Edition)
Lecture by Benjamin J. Harbert
Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Performing Arts at Georgetown University
DESCRIPTION: Angola Prison is the largest and one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, built into a slave plantation that Louisiana bought in 1901. It has also been the most musically significant. Ben Harbert’s new book, Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana's Angola Prison (Oxford University Press, 2023) chronicles dozens of musicians and bands over 120 years, showing how music is a vital resource for prisoners dependent on the ever-shifting music ecosystem. Music-making, however, is conditional, as the administration uses music in many ways. The history of musical negotiation and association offers a unique perspective on incarceration, politics, and the development of music in the twentieth-century American South. The lecture will highlight the musical, political, and intellectual role of jazz in the prison, from the 1950s through the 1960s.
BIO: Benjamin J. Harbert, Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Performing Arts at Georgetown University, examines the relationships between music and social institutions through his scholarship on prison music, documentary film, and American cultural history. He is the author of Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana's Angola Prison (Oxford University Press, 2023), which received the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society and the Portia K. Maultsby Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is also the author of American Music Documentary: Five Case Studies of Ciné-Ethnomusicology (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) and the director of Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians (Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 2013). He is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Audiovisual Ethnomusicology, editor of a special issue of American Music on Women's Prison Music (2013), and co-editor of The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013).
Part of the World Music Center Distinguished Scholar Series, this event is sponsored by the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.
This lecture is a pre-conference event for the 66th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology Southern California and Hawai’i Chapter (SEMSCHC) to be held at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on Saturday, March 1 and Sunday, March 2, 2025. https://www.semschc.org/program.html