Stanford sophomore Kailash Elumalai was deep into research about the Sri Lankan civil war when a story from a Tamil refugee caught his attention. It wasn’t about the war or conflict. Rather, it was a description of a childhood cricket game.
“It was a game of cricket right before this child would go on and live through a very traumatic time in history,” said Elumalai, a Stanford sophomore.
Elumalai tried to capture those last moments of innocence for his final project for History Goes Pop! Songwriting the Past. The winter quarter course taught by historian Tom Mullaney tasked students with an unusual assignment for a history course. Instead of writing a term paper about a story from the archive, why not write a pop song?
While Elumalai is a trained classical musician, songwriting was a first for the double-major in engineering physics and computer science. As Elumalai discovered throughout the quarter, composing music was a way to explore a person’s inner world in a new and different way.
“Historians don’t really concern themselves with the internal emotions that people are going through, because there are no primary sources for that,” Elumalai said. It made the past feel more personal for him, too.
Sampling the past in new ways
History Goes Pop! Songwriting the Past was offered in spring quarter as an Introductory Seminar, or “IntroSem” – a small, discussion-based course for frosh, sophomores, and new transfer students that explores a discipline in an unconventional or quirky way. For example, recent IntroSem offerings include a class on how we perceive our existence and another on the science of “what ifs.” History Goes Pop! Songwriting the Past builds on this tradition.
“It is genuinely a weird class. There is no way around it,” said Mullaney, the UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures.
Most people don’t do songwriting and historical research at the same time, but throughout his scholarly career, Mullaney has done both. When he was a student at Columbia University in the early 2000s, he was pursuing his PhD in history by day and, by night, was in a rock band that toured across the United States. Most recently, Mullaney, who studies technology and modern China, has been in a band called Chairman Wow.
He believes that doing both makes each one sharper.
Mullaney’s musical chops came into play during some of the course’s jam sessions. With him on guitar and piano, students would riff on lyrics they wrote that were inspired by historical material they had discovered in campus archives, including Special Collections, the Archive of Recorded Sound, and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
Over the quarter, students also listened to nearly 250 songs, studying how artists from the 20th and 21st centuries have captured particular moments in history.
For example, they listened to Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit,” a haunting protest song written by Abel Meeropol about the lynchings of African Americans. Other songs included “The Rising” by Bruce Springsteen, an anthem of hope and resilience written after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Black Sabbath’s “Headless Cross,” which sought to capture the despair a small English village devastated by the Great Plague of 1665 may have experienced.
During these critical listenings, students also paid attention to tempo, tone, call-and-response, and other stylistic choices the artists made to make their argument land – not too dissimilar, Mullaney noted, to how academics structure their own scholarly defense.
“When I am writing a book chapter, I am making the same kinds of rhetorical choices that a songwriter is making – they’re just subtler,” he said.
Back-up vocals for historical inquiry
Songwriting, Mullaney believes, encourages students to pay closer attention to details that defy definition.
“It slows your mind down and deepens your engagement with the primary source to avoid the old, all too common trap, especially among early researchers, of jumping to interpretation and trying to make it all make sense way, way, way too soon,” Mullaney said.
When I am writing a book chapter, I am making the same kinds of rhetorical choices that a songwriter is making – they’re just subtler.Tom MullaneyProfessor of History
For Elumalai, meditating on his song’s melody brought him closer to what it must be like to be a child during conflict: What happens when a war takes their childhood away? What does it mean for a child to take on the weight of growing up far too soon?
“Those are all questions that I started thinking about after this assignment,” Elumalai said. They also inspired Elumalai to delve deeper into the archives to learn more about the hardships endured by displaced children and how they find comfort and care from each other.
In addition to writing a song, students also had to write a research proposal, showing them how different formats respond to different aspects of the past – when one medium couldn’t answer a question they had, students could flip to the other.
For Mullaney and Elumalai, that’s where music comes in: It lets you explore those questions in ways that archives and academic writing alone cannot.
Mullaney encourages students to lean into those moments that may seem too strange for scholarly inquiry. It is this inexplicable curiosity that often leads to the most compelling histories.
Writer
Melissa De Witte