MUS 81504 Performance Practice of the 20th and 21st Centuries
Professor Tania León
Designed for both composers and performers, the course explores the aesthetic, historic and technical trends of 20th- and 21st-century music through presentation, discussion, composition and performance. Weekly meetings will be devoted to the coaching and critique of both student composition assignments and representative works. The class will culminate with a mandatory public concert, at the end of the semester, in Elebash Hall featuring important repertoire works and music composed by the students.
MUS 88300 Music of India
Professor Peter Manuel
This seminar explores diverse musics of India, engaging with music both in its formal aspects and as a socio-musical phenomenon. Exploration of North and South Indian classical and light-classical music will cover treatment of râg and tâl and other analytical aspects, and selected historical themes, including factors conditioning râg evolution, ancient and classical treatises, the transition from feudal to bourgeois patronage, Hindu-Muslim dynamics, and changing roles of women and hereditary performing castes. Students will learn to listen to clasisical musics in an infiormed way, encompassing recognition of several basic râg and tâls. Selected folk traditions and genres will then be covered, followed by the development of modern commercial popular musics, and musics of the Panjabi and Bhojpuri diasporas (especially in the Caribbean). Grades will be based on a short analysis assignment, a class report on a reading, class notes, and a take-home set of essay assignments. While many readings will be on ereserve, we will also be reading much of Neuman’s The Life of Music in North India, Bakhle’s Two Men and Music, and Manuel’s Cassette Culture.
MUS 86500 Research Seminar in Music History: Performance Studies
Professor Emily Wilbourne
As a field of scholarship, Performance Studies is notoriously difficult to define. Described as an inter-discipline and a post-discipline, critiqued as an anti-discipline, Performance Studies has interpreted its mandate in the widest possible sense. Covering both literal and figurative performances, acting and actions, Performance Studies has aggregated a focus on situated bodies, politically articulate methodologies, and a space for interpretive play. For music students, Performance Studies promises a corrective to disciplinary habits of disembodiment and the analytic abstractions of "the music itself." This class will serve as an introduction to foundational texts and concepts of Performance Studies, including speech-act theory (performativity) and multifaceted approaches to identity and embodiment (such as queer intersectionality and critical race theory). We will also consider Performance Studies as a means to think and write about music, about sound, and about the past. Students will develop a research paper focused on performance, in accordance with their academic interests.
MUS 85400 Intermediate Schenker Analysis
Professor William Rothstein
A continuation of Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis ("Schenker 1"), focusing primarily on music by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Weekly assignments in graphing will be supplemented by readings and a final presentation.
Music 85400 Seminar in Theory/Analysis: The Beatles
Professor Mark Spicer
This seminar will offer an in-depth study of the music of the Beatles. Using Walter Everett’s The Beatles as Musicians as our central reference, we will trace the group’s stylistic development, song-by-song and album-by-album, from their earliest days as the Quarry Men through their swan song Abbey Road. Our primary focus will be on analyzing the substance of the recordings themselves—that is, we will explore issues of form, harmony and voice leading, rhythm and groove, performance practice, text-music relations, recording technology, and so on—and yet we will also take time to consider the profound influence that the Beatles have had, and continue to have, in shaping not only the landscape of pop and rock music, but our postmodern world itself. (Enrollment limited to doctoral students in music, or by permission of the instructor.)
MUS 71500 DMA Topics
Professor Janette Tilley
In this second semester of DMA topics, we will explore and cultivate those skills and habits of mind that will help you succeed, and even enjoy, the dissertation research and writing process. Topics will be determined by the needs of the class, but will include: a re-examination the important tools for research in music and how to make effective use of them; strategies for developing and narrowing research questions; evaluating kinds of musical and historical evidence; writing persuasively about music.
Music 83100 Readings in Musical Ethnography
Professor Jane Sugarman
In this seminar we will read a selection of recent monographs in ethnomusicology in alternation with readings and assignments covering various aspects of ethnographic fieldwork. One course goal will be to take a measure of current topics and approaches in the field and evaluate the state of the ethnomusicological monograph. Another will be to use these monographs to explore aspects of research including research design and theoretical framework, participant observation, approaches to interviewing, archival research, writing strategies, and issues of representation and ethics. In addition to short, practical assignments during certain weeks, the final project will consist of a mock (or real) dissertation or fellowship proposal. There will also be possibilities for a practicum in filming, recording, and editing as a separate module during the semester.
MUS 87000 Medivalism and the Modern Musical Imagination
Professor Anne Stone
The list of composers who have engaged in some way with medieval music reads like a who’s who of musical modernism in Europe and the United States: Benjamin, Berio, Birtwistle, Hindemith, Maxwell Davies, Messiaen, Perle, Sariaho, Stravinsky, Webern, and Wuorinen, just to name some of the most obvious.
This seminar will explore the intersections between selected modernist composers and the specter of the Middle Ages. Is the relationship merely one of numerous isolated references, a collection of case studies, or is there a deeper affinity between the project of modernist music and the collective notion of the medieval? What do modernist composers think they are doing when they allude to medieval musical processes or literary themes? Is there a coherent "medievalism" discernible in modern music akin to that of neoclassicism or exoticism?
We will start by considering two recent operas that take troubadours as their subject: Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2000) and George Benjamin'sWritten on Skin (2012). Later works will be partially dictated by the interests of the students, but will include major works by (at least) Berio, Birtwistle and Davies.
Students will choose a short research topic to present in the first weeks of the course, and a longer presentation and paper (10-15 pages) at the end; the longer paper may be an elaboration of the earlier paper, or on a different topic.
Readings early in the semester will include two recent books from Art History and English respectively: Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012); Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); other reading will include articles and essays by Walter Benjamin, Luciano Berio, Bertold Brecht, Umberto Eco, Paul Hindemith, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, George Perle, Ezra Pound, George Perle, and Kirsten Yri.
MUS 86200 Mozart's Operas for Vienna
Professor Bruce MacIntyre
After a brief survey of Mozart’s early operas and their historical/stylistic contexts, this seminar will focus upon the operas composed during his last decade in Vienna, with special attention to dramatic structure and characterization. Relevant documentation, performance practices, and the ways in which the operas inform our understanding and performance of Mozart’s instrumental music will also be considered. In-class reports on assigned readings, score analysis of assigned operas, and individual term-paper topics. Knowledge of Italian and German helpful, but not required.
MUS 84600 Analyzing Atonal Music
Professor Joseph Straus
We will look closely at selected works from the modernist, post-tonal canon (works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartok, Crawford, Dallapiccola), roughly one work per class meeting. We will read in the extensive secondary analytical literature on these works, both to master the analytical methodologies and to evaluate the theoretical controversies. Prerequisite: a course in basic post-tonal theory or the equivalent.
MUS 81502 Performance Practice: Classic-Romantic.
Professor Raymond Erickson
This course, intended for DMA performance majors, is designed to be a practical introduction to historical performance practices in the period ca. 1750-1900. It will provide historical information through lectures, class reports, and book summaries and practical experience in implementing historical performing practices through in-class coachings and consideration of appropriate improvisation techniques. Each student will provide a personal synthesis of the materials and experiences of the class in a term paper.