Musicology
Course Descriptions
Fall 2012
Spring 2012
Older Courses
Fall 2012
MUY 590 Introduction to Musicology
H. Watkins
The goal of this course is to provide a detailed survey of musicological methodologies, present and past. After exploring the origins of musicology as a discipline, we will consider a broad range of scholarly approaches to and critical studies of music. Students will intervene in the ongoing arguments by writing a five-page paper every week that responds to and critiques the readings.
MUY 590 Debussy
H. Watkins
This course pairs in-depth study of Debussy’s music with consideration of developments in art, literature, and social relations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth century France. The class will explore Debussy’s relation to both Wagner and fin-de-siècle French composers. Vocal, piano, and orchestral music will be emphasized. Students should be prepared to engage in significant musical analysis. In-class presentations, short papers, a final presentation, and a final research paper will be required.
MUY 590 Music of Marian Devotion
M. Anderson
It is difficult to overestimate the status of the Virgin Mary in the devotional lives of late-medieval Christians. Believers sought the unparalleled intercession of Jesus’s mother in countless ways, including through prayer, visual culture, literature, and music. This course will probe the pervasive phenomenon of Marian devotion in music from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, chiefly through the lens of musicological scholarship of the past two decades. Students will be introduced to Mariology through a variety of perspectives (e.g. in repertories, festal commemorations, sources, institutions, and patronage). A significant part of the course will explore the convergence of sacred and secular topoi in musical expressions to the Virgin. The course requires a few student-led presentations, and a substantial term paper will be due at the end of the term. Some knowledge of Latin or French is helpful, but not mandatory.
MHS 590 Choreographers and Composers
K. Teal
In this course, we will consider the relationship between music and movement through the lens of significant collaborative dance pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries. Beginning with an introduction to Romantic ballet, we will also consider the central place of Tchaikovsky’s works in the classical ballet canon, the daring experiments in sound and movement that brought attention to the Parisian Ballets Russes in the early 20th century, the origins of modern dance, and ongoing choreographer/composer relationships like those between Balanchine and Stravinsky and Cunningham and Cage. One short paper and a longer final research paper and presentation will be required.
MHS 590 Mass: Chant to Stravinsky
P. Macey
The Mass has served over a period of 2,000 years as a central rite of sacrifice in the Christian tradition, and music plays a crucial role. The course will examine early chants for Christmas and the Requiem, and polyphonic settings by Leonin and Perotin, Machaut, Josquin, Palestrina and Monteverdi. Attention then turns to the Baroque concerted Mass and Bach’s Mass in B-Minor, as well as the symphonic Masses of Haydn and Beethoven. Aspects such as use of cantus firmus and musical borrowing, as well as religious function and meaning are explored. For the 20th century, Stravinsky’s Mass forms the focus of discussion. Students prepare a paper and make a class presentation on a particular work or composer, as well as several short written projects during the semester.
Spring 2012
MUY 590 Introduction to Ethnomusicology
E. Koskoff
This course offers a historiography of ethnomusicology, charting the genealogies of thought over the last several centuries that form our contemporary understanding of the discipline. It will provide a historical overview of the field of ethnomusicology, highlighting many of the seminal figures and works that have marked the discipline’s history and have led to shifts in the way ethnomusicologists understand the relationship of music, society, and culture. We will explore what it is that an ethnomusicologist does (or once did) by studying a variety of approaches to fieldwork methods and ethnographic representation. We will explore several theoretical orientations—drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, performance theory, media studies, and philosophy—that inform the work of past and present ethnomusicologists and introduce a range of musical styles, practices, and ways of thinking about sound in different parts of the world through the study of select musical ethnographies.
MUY 590 Music in Baroque Rome
R. Freitas
The seminar will focus on the music and culture of Rome from roughly 1623 to 1676 (covering the reigns of Urban VIII to Clement X). This period
and place represent the heart of the baroque, as defined by most artistic and cultural historians (outside music). We will study recent work on the nature of “baroque culture,” investigate the reigning aesthetics of the period, and become familiar with the major patrons and institutions in the city. All such “interdisciplinary” study will then be brought to bear on the prominent musical genres of baroque Rome, including at least opera, cantata, and oratorio; indeed, we will closely investigate a number of central works. The seminar will involve a significant research project.
MUY 590 Contemporary Aesthetics
H. Watkins
This course examines significant contributions to the discourse of musical aesthetics ranging from the late eighteenth century to the present. Careful readings of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer will provide the background for the study of later figures including Adorno, Jankélévitch, Nancy, Badiou, and Žižek. Themes to be considered include the historical, social, and economic dimensions of aesthetic discourse; current possibilities for the intersection of aesthetics, musicology, and music theory; and music’s relation to philosophical concepts of time and space. Several short papers/presentations and a final research paper will be required.
MHS 590 Bach Cantatas and Chorales
D. Zager
Bach’s sacred cantatas and organ chorale preludes found their functional place in the liturgy (Gottesdienst) of eighteenth-century Germany. This course explores various dimensions of those two genres—musical styles, liturgical function, reception by listening congregants, and questions of theological meaning. Certain topics will receive particular emphasis: the early cantatas and chorale preludes, viewed in part from the perspective of Georg Böhm’s and Dieterich Buxtehude’s works in those genres; the second cycle (Jahrgang) of Leipzig cantatas (1724–1725), which emphasizes the chorale; and part III of the Clavier-Übung (1739), one of Bach’s few published works, which also takes as its point of departure the chorale tradition.
MHS 590 Singers in 19th Century Opera
M. Esse
Scholars often depict the history of nineteenth-century opera as a struggle for control between singers and composers. In this tale, composers, with increasing success, transform or discard supposedly worn-out conventions (such as the cabaletta) because they emphasize vocal display at the expense of realism and dramatic action. This course explores a possible revision to the story by placing stylistic innovation in the larger context of changing singing styles and new models of vocal production. We will gain a broader view of such phenomena as the decline of trousered sopranos and the rise of trumpeting tenors by exploring how scientific studies of the human voice (exemplified in Manuel Garcia Jr.'s treatise) affected both vocal pedagogy and views of the "natural" relationship between voice and gender. Most importantly, instead of pitting singers against composers, we will examine their working relationships in detail in an effort to understand nineteenth-century opera as a collaborative affair that emerges through specific performance practices as well as musical and scenic conventions.
MHS 590 Debussy
H. Watkins
This course pairs in-depth study of Debussy’s music with consideration of developments in art, literature, and social relations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth century France. The class will explore Debussy’s relation to both Wagner and fin-de-siècle French composers. Vocal, piano, and orchestral music will be emphasized. Students should be prepared to engage in significant musical analysis. In-class presentations, short papers, a final presentation, and a final research paper will be required.
MHS 590 Ellington's Blues Pieces
W. Dobbins
Ellington’s Blues Pieces: The course will focus on compositions of Duke Ellington from the 1920s through the early 1970s which are either based on, or include as part of a larger formal structure, some variant of the the twelve-bar blues form. Each student will select a particular Ellington work to analyze, present to the class, and document in a paper at the end of the semester.
MHS 590 Listening To Popular Music
J. Kyker
Profoundly multivalent, musical sound offers multiple interpretive possibilities for audiences, requiring them to navigate ambivalent and potentially contradictory shades of meaning. While listening constitutes a dominant mode of sonic engagement for many individuals around the world, it has not constituted a major area of inquiry within the field of musical ethnography, which has focused primarily on issues of active musical performance, rather than reception. In this course, we will address the many theoretical and methodological challenges of conducting research on musical listening. Focusing primarily on the reception of mediated, commercial, and popular music, we will examine some of the varied trajectories taken by musical sound.