Smith College Professor Andrea Moore Explores How Music Shapes Society

In the years she spent as a percussionist and performing arts administrator, Smith College Associate Professor Andrea Moore often found herself pondering “scholarly questions” about the role that music plays in people’s lives.

Such big-picture curiosity led Moore to graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a Ph.D. in musicology. Along the way, she met a number of Smith alums who helped inspire her to want to teach on campus.

Moore’s scholarship looks at music through the framework of history and culture. Her new book, Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory, explores the links between music and collective mourning, including tributes related to AIDS, 9/11, and anti-Black violence. Moore’s fall semester Music and Democracy seminar course examines the role of music in “sustaining—or eroding—democracy,” through case studies of U.S. and global protest movements.

Moore’s journey to becoming a percussionist began with piano lessons and performing with the middle school band in her hometown of Houston, Texas. She was inspired by her mother’s interest in classical music—an interest that Moore has sustained to this day.

Her move from the performing arts to academia came at a time when the field of music studies was changing. 

“Musicology is said to be the musical equivalent of art history,” Moore says. “The roots of the current discipline’s form are in the 19th century, but in recent decades the field has become so much more expansive. It’s more interdisciplinary, more topical. My work touches on political theory, memory studies, and how music has the power to create community and identity.”

That power can be used for positive or negative social ends, says Moore. “We tend to look at music and community uncritically,” she notes. “In my classes, we talk about music as a moral neutral. It’s not really music that is or isn’t in a particular moral state—it’s us.”

Among the topics her students have been investigating this semester are protest songs, music used in political campaigns, and issues of censorship and urban planning—“who is allowed to make noise in public,” Moore says.

In a recent session of Music and Democracy, students were analyzing the impact of Prussian Blue, a pop duo from the early 2000s whose lyrics were criticized for espousing neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideas. The discussion took up ways that, as Moore put it, “political content is encoded, not just in lyrics, but in the music itself.”

The class conversation touched on issues ranging from the relationship between music and capitalism to pop music’s role in creating feelings of nostalgia and community. 

Moore is continuing her research on music and memorialization. In October, she gave a talk at Duke University on “Music, Crisis, Memory: New Music and the New Ends of History,” about music as a form of memory culture.

What current topics do her students seem most drawn to in the field of musicology?

“There’s a lot of interest in how music operates in relation to politics, identity, power, and expression,” Moore says. “These are questions that come up again and again.”

She hopes to offer her students a greater sense of their own ability to make an impact on culture and society.

“Music history is like any history. It can feel settled: This is what happened. I want to complicate that,” Moore says. “Things could be different. History is made by people and people make decisions. It could always have gone another way.”