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Graduate Seminars

Spring 2020

Music 203
Seminar in Composition
Ken Ueno

A study of relevant problems and compositional techniques of contemporary music. Original compositions required of students. Group discussion and criticism. This is a requirement for all first and second year MA students in Composition, and all first year students PhD students in Composition. Typically, a mix of individual composition lessons and occasional meetings as a class, resulting in the performance of the student compositions.

 

Music 204
Music Analysis
Cindy Cox

The application of analytical principles to a group of compositions from the late 20th and 21st centuries, and the intensive study of at least one major work.

 

Music 246
Theory and Methodology in Popular Music Studies
Jocelyne Guilbault

Critical survey of the major issues raised and methodologies used in the study of popular music. Selected readings from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, communication, history, political science, economics, and music journalism.

 

Music 247
Topics in Ethnomusicology–Music, Sexuality, Gender
Maria Sonevytsky

This course introduces ethno/musicological approaches to the study of sexuality and gender. We will study scholarly works that consider how music informs and reflects cultural constructions of femininity, masculinity, and non-binary genders, and consider questions of sexuality within and apart from these frameworks. Taking wide-ranging examples that include popular music, folk and indigenous musics, and European art music, we will investigate how gendered and sexualized subjectivities are negotiated through musical practices such as composition, performance, audition, and consumption. Class readings will include ethnomusicological, musicological, anthropological, feminist, Marxist, and queer theory approaches. Students will produce short weekly writings that synthesize and critique readings, and develop an ethnographic or historical research proposal that engages with and expands upon the questions that emerge from our weekly discussions.

 

Fall 2019

 

Music 200C
Intellectual History of Ethnomusicology
Jocelyne Guilbault

Introduction to issues and methods in ethnomusicology, from the perspectives of both the social sciences and music. Presentation of results in written and oral forms.

 

Music 201
Proseminar in Computer Music
Edmund Campion

Overview of the field of computer music and its application to music composition. Practices, procedures, and aesthetics related to the application of newer technologies to music composition will be covered in tandem with contemporary research topics in computer music. Recent computer music repertoire with its related technologies will be examined. Students in this proseminar must have advanced musical training and knowledge of the history and repertoire of 20th/21st c. western music.

 

Music 202
Seminar in Contemporary Music
Franck Bedrossian

Studies in 20th-century music.

 

Music 203
Seminar in Composition
Carmine Cella

A study of relevant problems and compositional techniques of contemporary music. Original compositions required of students. Group discussion and criticism. This is a requirement for all first and second year MA students in Composition, and all first year students PhD students in Composition. Usually, a mix of individual composition lessons and occasional meetings as a class, resulting in the performance of the student compositions.

Music 207
Advanced Projects in Computer Music
Edmund Campion

Designed for graduate students in music composition, but open to graduate students in related disciplines who can demonstrate thorough knowledge of the history of electro-acoustic music as well as significant experience with computer music practice and research. All projects are subject to approval of the instructor. A hard prerequisite of Music 201 or 158A

 

Music 220
Early Modern Phonographs
Lester Hu

This graduate seminar explores the early modern period as a globally transformative era for the relationship between voice and writing. How and why, we will ask, was writing reconceptualized specifically as the recording of speech and song in Western Europe, China, and the Americas during this period? How can this “phonographic turn” help us understand (early) modernity as a global moment and the many notions of phonocentrism and ocularcentrism that undergird current critical frameworks in the humanities? Readings will be drawn from studies on voice, sound, grammatology, opera, and popular songs in a cross-cultural setting, in addition to translated primary sources from early modern France, Qing Empire, and the Americas.

 

Music 228
Professional Development Seminar
Nicholas Mathew

This course provides direction to graduate students in the latter phase of their PhD degrees. It is devised to provide productive structure to the dissertation writing process, and to help students write and learn skills important to their professional development. Students will have the opportunity to work through their dissertation ideas and present their work orally in a supportive academic environment.

 

Music 243
Transcription and Analysis, Ethnomusicology
Ben Brinner

Methods and practice of transcription applied to selected musical practices in relation to specific analytical goals. Coursework includes use of software for sound analysis and notation.

 

Music 244B
Research Design
Jocelyne Guilbault

Instruction in designing a doctoral research project, writing a dissertation prospectus, and formulating a grant proposal. Focus also on issues such as representation and ethics. Students will normally take this course one semester prior to presenting the prospectus for their doctoral dissertation.

 

Spring 2019

 

Music 202
Orchestrating With Machines
Carmine Cella

Assisted orchestration can be thought as the process of searching for the best combinations of orchestral sounds to match a target sound under specified metric and constraints. Although a solution to this problem has been a long-standing request from many composers, it remains relatively unexplored because of its high complexity, requiring knowledge and understanding of both mathematical formalization and musical writing.

This graduate level seminar will provide the foundations of assisted orchestration, focusing on the specific needs of each student. After a general introduction aimed at providing both the scientific and philosophic backgrounds, the course will show in details the Orchidea tools for assisted orchestration. Each student will have the possibility to apply the discussed techniques on her own specific problems during individual teaching sessions. For further information please contact: carmine.emanuele.cella@gmail.com

 

Music 203
Composition Seminar
Cindy Cox

This required seminar provides the opportunity for graduate composition students in their first and second years of study to compose their pieces under the supervision of composition faculty.  It will feature study of relevant problems and compositional techniques in contemporary music, adapted to the interests and direction of the particular student. Most meetings will be primarily individual instruction.  Original compositions are required of students, with opportunities for group discussion and criticism throughout the semester.

 

Music 207
Advanced Projects in Computer Music
Edmund Campion

Designed for graduate students in music composition, but open to graduate students in related disciplines who can demonstrate thorough knowledge of the history of electro-acoustic music as well as significant experience with computer music practice and research. All projects are subject to approval of the instructor. 4 Units.

 

Music 210
Composers and Improvisers Workshop
Myra Melford

This course will provide a weekly forum for the exploration of the intersection between improvisation and composition and related issues. Broader topics include strategies for composing for improvisers, creating music that calls for improvisation by players who may or may not be “improvisers,” and using improvisation to develop ideas/materials. The course will culminate in the presentation of new work by each member of the seminar.

A number of approaches including open forms, gaming strategies, graphic and alternative notation systems, conduction, and other issues of interest to the students will be explored through compositional and improvisational exercises, listening, analysis, reading and student-led presentation/discussion.  Participants will be expected to compose for the class on a weekly basis, and all members are encouraged to perform (though this is not a requirement for participation). Mixed media and technology-related projects are welcome. Occasional individual lessons will be offered in lieu of weekly class meetings.

 

Music 220
Sound Reproduction Ecologies
James Q. Davies/Gavin Williams

As product, resource, artifact and waste, sound is embedded and embroiled in material ecologies and global, gendered divisions of labor. Noisy matter—metal strings, wax cylinders, tarmacked roads, vocal tracts—stretches across bodies and environments, enacting sensory orders and political worlds. This course thematizes global industries of resource extraction and circulation necessary to sound reproduction. It broaches the stakes for “elemental thinking” in sound—listening out for the raw matter of sound’s “political ecology.” We will analyze such concepts as “soundscapes,” “acoustemologies,” and “anthropologies of sound”: concepts now widely deployed in musicology, sound studies, and increasingly farther afield, in disciplines linked to the environmental humanities. We will explore historical intimacies between sound technologies, fossil fuels, and contemporary modes of knowledge production in the age of the Anthropocene. Taking our cue from recent scholarly efforts to green the media and unmask occluded media labor, we will inquire after long-standing entanglements between music and environment, and interrogate the critical stakes of un-concealment in the name of sonic environmentalism. Other topics include: insect agency and shellac, forest science and tropico-colonial/polar extraction, thermodynamics and mining, aerophonics, multinaturalism and climate change.

 

Music 247
Sound Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Acoustic and Auditory
Thomas Porcello

This seminar centers on the examination of the (always multiple) cultural dimensions of acoustic and aural phenomena.  The past fifteen-to-twenty years have seen an explosion of scholarship (particularly, but not exclusively, in the Anglophone West) on sound and culture, in academic disciplines spanning the humanities and social sciences.  One goal for this course will be to develop familiarity with the scope and the disciplinary histories that have resulted in the emergence of the “field” of Sound Studies, while simultaneously interrogating the notion of it as, in fact, a “field.” In so doing, we will explore a range of histories and ethnographies of sound and listening as they intersect with topics in music, media studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology. As a result, a secondary goal for the course is to acquaint students with the broadly interdisciplinary approaches and subjects that fall under the Sound Studies rubric. Areas of study may include the senses, histories of sound recording and reproduction technologies, field recordings, acoustic ecologies, conceptions of noise, soundscapes, sound art, podcasting, the voice, listening, and music.

 

Music 249
Interpretive Theories in Music
Future Trends in Ethnomusicological Research
Jocelyne Guilbault

The course will look at theoretical trends in social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies influencing the reshaping of ethnomusicology, the cultural study of music and sound. How is the vocabulary of ethnomusicology changing? Who is being read and why? What are the key words and key concepts emerging in this moment in contemporary academic discourse? In this seminar, we will explore the genealogies and evaluate the intellectual utility of new theoretical perspectives for planning research in ethnomusicology. The areas of critical investigation will include subjectivity and personhood, affect and emotion, body and the senses, and violence, trauma, and social memory.

 

Fall 2018

 

Music 200B
Introduction to Music Scholarship II
Nicholas Mathew

Principles and methods of scholarly research in Western art music, especially history and criticism of music; use of documents, and design of projects. Presentation of results in written and oral forms.

 

Music 200C
Introduction to Music Scholarship III
Intellectual History of Ethnomusicology
Jocelyne Guilbault

The aim of the seminar is to address the history of ideas in ethnomusicology and the professionalization of the field from the 1950s onwards. We will focus on leading figures and trace their intellectual lineages. We will also examine the ideological, theoretical, and methodological shifts and issues that ethnomusicologists have been negotiating, defending, and confronted with over the years. In so doing, we will examine how ethnomusicology has been influenced by and distinguished itself from other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences at different historical moments. What was ethnomusicology’s relation to musicology, anthropology, popular music studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, sociology of music, performance studies, or philosophy fifty years ago or twenty years ago? What is ethnomusicology’s relation to these disciplines today? 

In the course of this seminar, we will situate in time and in space the issues that have dominated ethnomusicological writings. Here we will need to bear in mind that in conjunction with the socio-economic conditions, political history, geographic locations, and materialities in which they unfold, the specificities of local musical practices (e.g., court musics versus folk or popular musics, female- versus male-dominated practices) have power of their own over the questions that are asked about them. We will thus compare and contrast the theories and methodologies used to study local, national, and regional musical practices in different parts of the world. So we will ask, what issues have the specialists from different areas of studies focused on, for example, from the perspective of an Africanist, Asianist, Caribbeanist, Latin Americanist, or Americanist?

 

Music 201A
Proseminar in Computer Music
Edmund Campion

Overview of the field of computer music and its application to music composition. Practices, procedures, and aesthetics related to the application of newer technologies to music composition will be covered in tandem with contemporary research topics in computer music. Recent computer music repertoire with its related technologies will be examined. Students in this proseminar must have advanced musical training and knowledge of the history and repertoire. 4 Units

 

Music 203
Composition Seminar
Franck Bedrossian

This required seminar provides the opportunity for graduate composition students in their first and second years of study to compose their pieces under the supervision of composition faculty.  It will feature study of relevant problems and compositional techniques in contemporary music, adapted to the interests and direction of the particular student. Most meetings will be primarily individual instruction.  Original compositions are required of students, with opportunities for group discussion and criticism throughout the semester.

 

Music 220
Music as Biopolitics
Delia Casadei

Although biopolitics as a political and philosophical field dates to the 1970s, the relationship of music, sound, listening and biopolitics has only just entered musicology and sound studies. This course takes the form of a survey of musicological and sound studies work on biopolitics, but aims to connect these new efforts both to the older biopolitical literature that they draw on, on the one hand, and also to current critiques, extensions, and even indictments of biopolitics outside of musicology, on the other. Is biopolitics as an area of inquiry able to pose new, better questions concerning the connections of sound to community, life, reproduction, race? In what way can a study of sonic practices function not only as a continuation, but as a constructive critique of certain aspects of biopolitical philosophy (its eurocentrism, its delayed engagement with gender, its lack of engagement with theories of race)?

 

Music 228
Professional Development Seminar
James Davies

This course provides direction to graduate students in the latter phase of their PhD degrees. It is devised to provide productive structure to the dissertation writing process, and to help students write and learn skills important to their professional development. Students will have the opportunity to work through their dissertation ideas and present their work orally in a supportive academic environment.

 

Music 244A
Tools of Ethnomusicological Research
Maria Sonevytsky

What are the ethical stakes, practical questions, and methodological tools that define how we “do ethnomusicology”? This course is a survey of and practicum in ethnographic methods with a focus on ethnographic studies of sound and music. Our objective is to survey the intellectual debates around doing ethnography while developing our own practice as ethnographers. We will evaluate and critique traditional methods of ethnographic engagement such as participant-observation; interviewing; visual, sonic and textual analysis; archival research; styles of inscription and representation, and we will address the challenges of doing fieldwork in a variety of contexts. Weekly writing exercises will raise important questions about how qualitative research can be ethically and effectively “translated” into written text. Some practical orientation to issues around data collection, organization, and storage, as well as basic microphone and recording techniques, will also be covered. Seminar participants will develop a mini-ethnographic research project of their own design throughout the course of the semester which will serve as the basis for varied exercises in ethnographic interpretation and representation.