Class connects music to AIDS epidemic

Sitting with their desks in a circle in a small room in the IU School of Optometry, a group of seven graduate students, one auditor and a professor discuss the musical "Rent." \nAlthough the graduate seminar, provided by the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, might appear like a music course, it looks solely at -- as the name suggests -- "Musical Responses to the AIDS Pandemic."\nProfessor Judah Cohen instructs this unusual course, which meets from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. Mondays, and guides his students through various ways the United States and Africa have used music to address the AIDS crisis. According to the syllabus, students write assignments about the weekly readings and give 30- to 40-minute final presentations at the end of the semester on topics of the students' choosing. \nDuring the semester, students gain a sense of how musical responses to AIDS came about and how these responses evolved over time and were given roles within different groups. During the class's discussion of "Rent," for example, Cohen noted that not only lyrics, but also sounds of instruments themselves within the musical have a correspondence to the reaction of AIDS. \n"Somehow, there is a connection between sounds of a musical and discourse as well as the specter of AIDS itself," he said.\nEd Chamberlain is an auditor who is working on his Ph.D. in comparative literature and is taking the course to provide a new perspective for his work. \n"Up to now, I haven't had the opportunity to explore my focus through ethnomusicology, and so I'm glad to say that this class is presenting a great opportunity to develop my work in a productive, new direction," Chamberlain said. \nChamberlain, who wrote his master's thesis on representations of AIDS, said the class is important in order to raise awareness on the topic and possibly promote further study of it.\nDuring a trip to Uganda two years ago, one of Cohen's colleagues mentioned an increase of AIDS-related music. Cohen said it was that conversation that first inspired him to create the course. \n"I wanted to explore the connection between music and disease," he said. "It is one that has a real significance but hasn't really been touched upon." \nBecause different communities each have their own unique reactions to AIDS, this presents a problem, Cohen said.\n"You can't localize (AIDS). It's a global situation," Cohen said.\nDave Lewis, who is working on his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, said he took a medical anthropology course as an undergraduate and enjoyed it.\n"I loved the course but couldn't see any way to connect it to music," he said. "This course provides that." \nLewis also said focusing a dissertation around the connection between music and AIDS would be one way that someone could, as Lewis puts it, "get out of academia and give back to society.