Musicology
Course Descriptions
Fall 2009
Spring 2009
Older Courses
Fall 2009
MUY 501 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 591 Opera in 17th-C. Venice
R. Freitas
In this seminar we will explore the genre of opera as it was practiced in Venice in the seventeenth century. This period—covering the output of Monteverdi and Cavalli—was crucial for the genre and generated many of the traditions recognizable in opera today. We will not only study the genre itself—its librettos and the musical responses of its composers—but will also consider the role of opera in contemporary Venetian society. Indeed, the investigation of several non-musical institutions will be essential. Accordingly, we will employ a variety of methodological approaches, from the study of sources to the investigation of performance practices to the application of feminist and other cultural criticisms. The secondary literature in this field is rich and has further expanded in recent decades, with crucial contributions from Ellen Rosand, Wendy Heller, Jonathan and Beth Glixon, Tim Carter, and many others. The seminar will culminate in a large research project from each student.
MUY 591 Music and the Cold War
L. Jakelski
Music was played for high stakes in the Cold War. Beginning in the late 1940s, the United States and the Soviet Union strove to prove their supremacy in contests of cultural prowess. The struggle between the two great foci of the Cold War likewise impacted cultural policy and musical life in the nations that lay within their competing spheres of influence. This course will examine the compositional trends, artistic debates, and musical institutions that arose in response to the era’s global political conflict. We will move through a series of units grounded in distinct geographical locations; stops on our itinerary will include New York, Moscow, Paris, Darmstadt, East and West Berlin, Budapest, and Warsaw. At each destination, we will examine primary sources, read recent scholarly work on the cultural aspects of the Cold War, and analyze selected pieces of music (including works by Babbitt, Copland, Shostakovich, Schnittke, Boulez, Eisler, Lutosławski, Penderecki, Nono, Ligeti and Kurtág). Throughout the course, we will think about how local concerns at each destination intersected with the broad issues of the Cold War. We will also consider points of similarity among the places we study, investigating how music created ties that bound together East and West during this period, as well as reinforcing the divisions that separated them. Seminar assignments will include a final paper/presentation, short midterm paper, and regular presentations to facilitate class discussion.
MHS 590 The Improvising Musician
E. Koskoff
Improvisation, from simple ornamentation to “composition-in-performance” is a process that affects many world musics. The class will examine various musical traditions, such as Baroque keyboard genres, European vocal epics, Indian ragas, Persian/Iranian dastgahs, Central Javanese shadow puppet plays, and Japanese shakuhachi traditions focusing on the structure of improvisational grammars and how these are realized in performance. Various notation systems will be examined in relation to what is “set” and what is “added” to create an elegant performance. Further, improvisation as a process will be examined in light of more general beliefs concerning music as a form of communication and social interaction. Students will be asked to listen to, transcribe, and analyze various world music performances that involve improvisation and to read relevant literature from both western and non-western sources. No previous knowledge of or ability to improvise is required.
MHS 590 Music in the Himalayas
S. Fiol
How have the geographical conditions of the Himalayas impacted the development of musical and social life? How has the relationship to the environment contributed to the cultural isolation of groups within the region? Conversely, how has this relationship facilitated the sharing of musical forms and cultural practices across Himalayan regions, leading to the development of regionalist or nationalist movements? We will read and discuss a number of musical ethnographies set in Tibet, Nepal, North India, and Pakistan, and this will allow us to compare and contrast the cosmologies and musical practices of Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Sikh communities. Through reading, listening to recordings, and learning to perform on one or more instruments in a central Himalayan percussion ensemble, students will become familiar with a range of musical styles produced and consumed for devotional, commercial, and traditional purposes.
2009 Spring Course descriptions
Musicology PhD Seminars
MUY/ETH 502 Introduction to Ethnomusicology
S. Fiol
As a historiography of ethnomusicology, the course will chart the genealogies of thought over the last several centuries that inform our contemporary understanding of the discipline. 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. Finally, we will assess challenges to the discipline, and chart a course for an ethnomusicology of the 21st century.
MUY 592 Bach Cantatas & Organ Chorales
D. Zager
This seminar provides an opportunity for musicologists, organists, and choral conductors to explore the sacred cantatas and organ chorales of J. S. Bach within musical, liturgical, and theological contexts. Musical forms, procedures, and styles in the organ chorales and cantatas of Bach’s predecessors and contemporaries will be explored as musical contexts for Bach’s works. Questions of how cantatas and organ chorales functioned liturgically in the worship services of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Thuringia and Saxony may be assessed by studying Lutheran Mass and Office liturgies, lectionaries, and hymnals of that era. The influences of both Lutheran orthodoxy and pietism, as well as Bach’s personal theological library (including two editions of the writings of Martin Luther), provide theological contexts fundamental to exploring the meaning of these sacred genres—for Bach and for the congregants who were the first listeners to his cantatas and organ chorales.
MUY 592 Music, Society, & Culture 1800-1900
R. Locke
The aim of this course is to explore a number of different approaches to the relationship between music and its cultural and social contexts during the nineteenth century. It does not attempt to cover all the major contributions of the major composers, nor all the wider trends in musical life. Instead, we will be “sampling” a broad spectrum of issues, methods, and music-historiographical “problems,” with an emphasis on “open” rather than “closed” cases and with preference given to recent writings by musicologists and “allied” scholars.
Wherever possible, we will connect the discussion of musicological issues to musical repertory; thus score study, analysis and listening will be an important aspect of the seminar (thereby resisting the common prejudice that contextual issues can be perfectly well treated with no regard to musical experience and to aesthetic considerations).
The teaching styles will range from instructor and student presentations (the latter in the form of short reports) to discussions based on reading assignments and other outside projects.
MUY 592 Postmodernism
H. Watkins
This course examines various theories and instances of postmodernism in music, the arts, and culture at large. Beginning with select musical trends and cultural transformations dating to the 1960s, the class moves through a wide variety of music, and as far into the present as possible, in hopes of assessing the meaning and usefulness of the idea of postmodernity. In particular, we will be concerned with the degree to which postmodern characteristics of recent art, architecture, economics, and the media can also be identified in music, and what those correspondences suggest about the nature of postmodern culture in general. Periodic in-class presentations, a final extended presentation, and a final paper are required.
MHS 590 Asian Classical Musics
E. Koskoff
Classical musics exist throughout the world. Historically connected to economic and political court systems, classical traditions persist in contemporary times as highly valued cultural expressions. Here, we will examine classical musics in five different contemporary Asian musical cultures—Iran (Persia), India, Indonesia, Japan, and China, concentrating on contemporary issues of reception, preservation and on how various classical music discourses contribute to local, national, and global politics.