Musicology
Course Descriptions
Fall 2008
Spring 2008
Previous Courses
Fall 2008
MUY 591 The Motet before 1360
Michael Anderson
The motet represents one of the most important, if enigmatic, innovations in the realm of early polyphonic composition. Its origins are contained in Paris in the great musical corpus that contributed to an elaborate liturgy at the cathedral of Notre Dame toward the end of the twelfth century. This course will outline the rise of the motet and its relationship to discant clausulae from the Magnus liber organi and will trace further its development in some of the major sources of polyphony from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, culminating in the works of Guillaume de Machaut. Of particular concern in the Notre Dame repertory will be the clusters of motets based on a single tenor. Also, students will examine the array of sacred and secular themes that regularly converge in the early motet. There will be several short presentations and an article-length paper due as the final term project. Some knowledge of Latin or French is helpful, but not mandatory.
MUY 591 Sondheim
Kim Kowalke
The seminar will explore in depth the oeuvre of Stephen Sondheim, who has been the central creative figure in the American musical theater for the last half century. Because much of his output references the history, style, and genres of the past as "metadramatic" commentary, we will also study selected works from the standard repertory in parallel with Sondheim's works. Assignments will include weekly listening, reading, and viewing; several seminar presentations, as well as a final "professional" paper.
Spring 2008
MUY 592 The Cantata in Rome, ca. 1620-ca. 1670
R. Freitas
A product of the experiments with monody that launched the baroque period in music, the cantata is perhaps the most characteristic genre of its age. Far cheaper to produce than opera or oratorio, and more esteemed than instrumental forms, the cantata served as the everyday entertainment of musically-inclined aristocrats; libraries and archives all over Europe preserve these works by the thousands. Yet they have received surprisingly little study (or performance). This seminar will explore the Italian chamber cantata in Rome, from its inception as a genre, through the works of Luigi Rossi, Giacomo Carissimi, and their contemporaries, to around 1670. We will consider the genre from poetic, stylistic, and social perspectives. In fact, these pieces have been so little investigated that virtually every project will constitute original research. Students will work extensively with facsimiles or microfilms of original manuscripts. Some experience with Italian—or at least a Romance language—is desirable. There will be regular classroom presentations and a large final project.
MUY 592 Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections
R. Locke
Portrayal of exotic places, peoples, and cultures—including exotic musical styles—has been a central (but often misunderstood) shaping factor in Western music. This course explores a variety of ways in which composers have engaged in musical exoticism despite the fact that music—unlike painting or the novel—is not inherently representational. Important trends are noted, and case studies examined: from Handel’s and Rameau’s Byzantine and Incan tyrants, Mozart’s “Rondo alla turca,” Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade; to Debussy’s “Pagodes,” Bernstein’s West Side Story, and Tan Dun’s culture-bridging Symphony 1997: Heaven, Earth, Man. Several short papers and a final one that aims to make an article-length contribution to scholarship.
Previous Courses
Fall 2007
MUY 501 Introduction to Musicology
R. Freitas
Introduction to Musicology, a required foundation course for musicology graduate students, is also open (by consent of the instructor) to other graduate students with an interest in the field of musicology and historical research. The course has three areas of focus: (1) the materials and methods of musicological research, including bibliographic and other sources; (2) historic and current conceptions of the discipline, with a particular emphasis on the diversity of methodologies now in use; and (3) proficiency at reasoning and writing, emphasizing the ability to construct viable arguments and prosecute them in effective prose. After several weeks of introduction and reading, the bulk of the course will take a hands-on approach, with students doing small-scale research projects each week and presenting their results to the seminar. There will not be a large final project in the course.
MUY 591 Early Music Analysis pre-1600
P. Macey
Early music before 1600 has been the subject of various analytical approaches regarding tonality, progressions, and motivic procedures. Among others, we will examine work by Sarah Fuller and Margaret Bent on directed progressions and grammatical readings of 14th- and 15th-century music. For the late 15th and 16th centuries, we will turn to studies of motivic structures in Ockeghem and Josquin by Lawrence Bernstein, contrapuntal structures by John Milsom, and modal procedures by Harold Powers and Cristle Collins Judd. For the mid to late 16th century we will look at Peter Schubert’s work on recombinant melody and Anthony Newcomb’s studies of hexachordal transformations in instrumental music.
MUY 591 Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera: Staging Body, Voice, Society
M. Esse
Both the texts and the practices of the Italian opera industry during its era of peak production will be the subject of study. The works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Mercadante, and Verdi will serve as lenses to help bring cultural attitudes towards gender, performance, politics, and romantic aesthetics into focus. Throughout the term, students will trace the connections between text and act, considering how Italy's unique cultural context made the operatic "work" a fluid and malleable thing, one that relied more on the performance event than on a fixed score. Required work: presentations, short paper, final research project.
MUY 591 Music and Cultural Studies: Basic Themes
M. Scherzinger
The course is an introduction to basic themes in Cultural Studies and their implications for the study of music within global modernity. By raising questions that arise at the intersections of Poststructuralism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Postcolonialism, the course will examine ways the critiques of representational theories of language, commodity fetishism, the intending subject and Eurocentrism interrupt and intertwine with musical practice (composition/performance/reception) as well as writing about music.
Spring 2007
MUY/ETH 502/590 Introduction to Ethnomusicology
Ellen Koskoff
Introduces the basic readings, history, and methods of ethnomusicology. Course work will include class readings, discussions, transcription projects, and a semester-long fieldwork project undertaken in the Rochester area. Readings will be taken primarily from the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies.
MUY 592 Romantic Criticism and Aesthetics
Holly Watkins
This course examines early nineteenth-century music from the standpoint of critical and philosophical writings dating from the period 1780-1850. Focusing primarily on German music and texts, the course will consider various literary and musical meanings of Romanticism, the emergence of a distinct instrumental music aesthetics, and the political contexts of Romantic reception. Taking central texts by Kant, Schopenhauer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Hegel as a point of departure, the class aims to broaden the range of musical meanings available in a repertory that includes, among others, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner. Requirements include a final paper and presentation plus several short papers/presentations given over the course of the semester. Permission of instructor required.
MUY 592 Roman de Fauvel
Gabriela Ilnitchi
In this course we will embark on a multidisciplinary analysis and interpretation of the early fourteenth-century “Roman de Fauvel” (Paris, BN f. fr. 146). An examination of the historical and socio-cultural contexts that led to the composition of the Roman and the production of the manuscript will go hand in hand with an in-depth consideration of the complex visual, poetic, and musical intertextuality manifest in this Parisian cultural artifact. Furthermore, we will explore issues pertaining to the attribution, notation, and transmission of the polyphonic and monophonic interpolations, as well as the larger question of medieval textual and musical performance.
MUY 592 Bach Cantatas and Chorale Preludes
Daniel Zager
This seminar provides an opportunity for musicologists, organists, and choral conductors to explore the sacred cantatas and organ chorales (chorale preludes) of J. S. Bach within musical, liturgical, and theological contexts. The musical context for these genres involves studying the music of Bach’s predecessors and contemporaries. A composer of the previous generation, such as Johann Pachelbel, exerted an influence on the young Bach, who copied and studied the organ chorales of this older musician. By contrast, Bach had personal contact with Georg Böhm and Dieterich Buxtehude, both of whom became for him influential models and (short-term) teachers. The cantatas of Bach’s contemporaries, Christoph Graupner and Georg Philipp Telemann, provide a window into the broader world of the German sacred cantata during the years Bach was composing his Leipzig cantatas. Similarly, the organ chorales of Bach’s contemporary Georg Friedrich Kauffmann provide a contemporaneous point of comparison for Bach’s own organ chorale preludes. The liturgical context involves study of both church year and lectionary in Bach’s day—then, as now, crucial determinative factors in the practice of sacred music. Published hymnals of the time also provide important contextual information, as do both the Mass and Office liturgies, and the place and role of music within those liturgical occasions. Taken together, such contextual factors of church shed light on how cantatas and organ chorales were used in the worship services of 18th-century Germany. The theological context necessarily involves a study of the theological climate of that time in Thuringia and Saxony, including the relative influences of both Lutheran orthodoxy and pietism. A second contextual factor is Bach’s personal theological library, and the influence on Bach of the writings of Martin Luther. Study of these theological contexts is fundamental to exploring the meaning of these sacred genres—for Bach and the congregants who were the first listeners to his cantatas and organ chorales, and for today’s listeners as well. Graded work for the course includes active, informed participation in seminar discussions; leading the seminar on two occasions; and a final paper and its effective oral presentation.
Fall 2006
MUY 501 Introduction to Musicology
Roger Freitas
Introduction to Musicology, a required foundation course for musicology graduate students, is also open (by consent of the instructor) to other graduate students with an interest in the field of musicology and historical research. The course has three areas of focus: (1) the materials and methods of musicological research, including bibliographic and other sources; (2) historic and current conceptions of the discipline, with a particular emphasis on the diversity of methodologies now in use; and (3) proficiency at reasoning and writing, emphasizing the ability to construct viable arguments and prosecute them in effective prose. After several weeks of introduction and reading, the bulk of the course will take a hands-on approach, with students doing small-scale research projects each week and presenting their results to the seminar. There will not be a large final project in the course.
MUY 591 Illuminated Music Manuscripts
Honey Meconi
The course examines the role of illuminated music manuscripts in the culture of early music. The focus will be on the manuscripts prepared by the scriptorium associated with the Habsburg-Burgundian court during the first decades of the sixteenth century, which will provide a starting point for investigation into other significant music manuscripts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Permission of instructor is required.
MUY 591 Theories of Rhetoric in 18th-Century Music
Gretchen Wheelock
This course will address issues of composition, reception, and performance in relation to various concepts of musical rhetoric in the mid-to-late18th century. With particular focus on instrumental music, we will examine specific works by J.S. Bach, C.P.E Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in light of such rhetorical concepts as Figurenlehre, Formenlehre, and Affektenlehre. Broad topics to be explored will include Rhetoric as Structure and Compositional Process; Rhetoric and Affect: Topoi and Intertextuality; Rhetoric and Aesthetics: From the Sublime to the Playful; Rhetoric and the Performer: Then and Now. In addition to primary readings we will evaluate more recent theories advanced by Leonard Ratner, Wye J. Allanbrook, Kofi Agawu, George Barth, Mark Evan Bonds, Elaine Sisman, and others. We will also address questions of genre and the roles of performers and listeners in 18th-century venues as well as those of today.
Students will be responsible for short, focused presentations to launch and facilitate class discussion of specific questions about the readings and musical pieces under consideration. They will also prepare a final project framed by the perspective of musical rhetoric, whether in the analysis of various procedures in a single work, the analysis of a particular procedure in several works, or in preparing the performance of a work with written commentary about its rhetorical aspects.
MUY 591 Stage to Screen: 1880-1930
Melina Esse
Stage to Screen: 1880 -1930: This course focuses on different performance spaces and aesthetics in late 19th- and early 20th-century American musical life, dealing specifically with genres and practices that unite the visual and the aural (theater, opera, melodrama, and film). We will be particularly concerned with exploring the negotiation between live and "mechanically reproduced" performance as film becomes the dominant form of entertainment in the U.S. Incidental music for melodramas, live musical (and spoken) accompaniment for silent films, and changing practices of opera staging will all come under the purview of the course. Students will have the opportunity to delve into primary sources from the George Eastman house and to immerse themselves in performance and film theory as we investigate contemporary notions of presence, voice, and body. Requirements: Weekly readings, one short midterm paper, longer final research paper.
Spring 2006
MUY/ETH 502 Introduction to Ethnomusicology
Ellen Koskoff
MUY 592 National Syles and Exoticism in Western Music
Ralph Locke
This seminar explores a number of topics and individual works that relate in some way to the problems of "national style" and "exoticism" in Western concert and theater music. There have always been national traditions, and borrowings from other traditions, but the phenomenon of distinct national styles became more pronounced, for various reasons, in the 18th and especially 19th centuries (in part as a reaction to a simultaneous internationalizing of musical style) and has continued in certain traditions up to our own day. We will explore examples ranging from the highly conscious and even sarcastic imitations of Chinese and Japanese music in Puccini's Turandot and Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado , to the often unconscious and deeply organic absorption of folk and popular elements in Haydn, say, or Schubert. Identifying these elements is a first step; then one must try to determine what they "meant" to composer and audience and show how they function in a given piece. What at first sounds like a rather specialized problem--national styles--turns out to be central to many repertoires, from Mozart to Brahms to Debussy to Britten to Bernstein. Examples in popular culture abound, too--from classic film scores to Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, or Alanis Morissette--and raise equally vexing questions of interpretation. In addition, attention will be given to the many instances in which the non-Western "other" is portrayed as distinctively different without recourse to foreign style traits , as happens in certain (but not all) numbers in such operas as Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio , Meyerbeer's L'Africaine , Bizet's Carmen and Verdi's Aida and, again, in much film music.
MUY 592 Medieval Musical Thought
Gabriela Ilnitchi
In this class we will investigate various issues in medieval musical thought from Boethius to Johannes de Muris. Careful reading of numerous theoretical treatises will be informed by contemporary scholarly literature on the subject. Although there is no unifying "theme," we will pay particular attention to the transformations that modal and acoustic theories underwent in the pre-modern era and the manner in which these transformations relate to the larger philosophical and scientific contemporaneous world.
MUY 592 Kurt Weill and his Contemporaries
Kim Kowalke
This seminar will focus on the stage works of Kurt Weill (1900-50), "the most problematic 20th-century composer," according to Richard Taruskin. Operating first both within and outside the thriving operatic culture of the Weimar Republic, Weill subsequently wrote for both French and British institutions before spending the last fifteen years of his life experimenting with various hybrid genres of American musical theater, including Broadway opera. The course will utilize the composer's holograph scores and extensive correspondence housed at Sibley and will address thorny contextual issues of aesthetics, reception, and cultural settings. Several in-class presentations and a final research paper will be required.
Fall 2005
MUY 501 Introduction to Musicology
Roger Freitas
MUY/ETH 591 Music and Ritual
Ellen Koskoff
An examination of ritual and the role it plays within various world music-cultures. Readings will be drawn mainly from anthropology and ethnomusicology, and will focus on ritual as a musico-dramatic event/process of transcendence, protest, and/or the display of cultural beliefs and values. Students will prepare a semester-long research or ethnographic project and will be assigned various oral presentations throughout the semester.
MUY 591 The Italian Madrigal
Patrick Macey
The Italian madrigal continues to stimulate research into its origins and interpretation, including recent books by Susan McClary and Anthony Cummings. The seminar will focus on development of the early madrigal in Florence and Venice, including work of Verdelot, Arcadelt, Willaert, and Rore. The scope will extend to Marenzio and Monteverdi. Approaches will include study of Petrarchism, relation of words and music, including Bembo's writings on the Italian vernacular, and analytical approaches, particuarly mode. Secondary materials will include writings by James Haar, Iain Fenlon, Howard Brown, Martha Feldman, and Gary Tomlinson.
MUY 59 1 Reading Mozart's Operas
Gretchen Wheelock
In their readings of an opera's meanings, some critics have focused on the libretto for its story, others on the music as subtext and equal dramatic partner in that story, still others on the historical context of the original production itself and its reception. We will consider these various approaches to the interpretation of selected operas, asking not simply what an opera means, but how does it mean, when, and for whom? Addressing Mozart's operas as music dramas and dramatic music, we will explore their historical contexts and audiences, as well as some of the critical and analytical approaches that have been used in "explaining" their meanings for various listeners, then and now.
Spring 2005
MUY 502 Introduction to Ethnomusicology
Ellen Koskoff
Introduces the basic readings, history, and methods of ethnomusicology. Course work will include class readings, discussions, transcription projects, and a semester-long fieldwork project undertaken in the Rochester area. Readings will be taken primarily from the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies.
MUY 592 19th-Century Music and Society
Ralph 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 and methods, with an emphasis on "open" rather than "closed" cases and with preference given to recent musicological 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 to discussions based on reading assignments. The course will include a midterm and a final exam. Written assignments will tend to be short and varied (a book report, an analysis of two contending articles, etc.). Tentatively scheduled weekly topics include Music and Message (French Revolution, Including the Founding of the Conservatoire); Beethoven's Ninth and Its Aftermath; Italian Opera to 1850 (Society, Politics, "the Opera Industry," the Impresario, Musical Dramaturgy); Program Music: Fertile Paradoxes (Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and the Power of the Musical Press); Approaches to Lied Composition (from Schubert to Wolf, with Consideration of Linguistic/Syntactic Constraints and Conventions); Russia's Search for High Culture and a National Musical Identity (Musorgsky, the Other Four, Tchaikovsky, and the Power of a National Conservatory); Instrumental Music without Program (Schubert, Schumann, Liszt Sonata, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner, Chopin, and the Apparent?/Real? Dominance of German Aesthetics and Musical Values Over International Concert Institutions and Repertoire); Wagner's Ring: What Shaped It and What Its Shape Is (Polemics and Artistic Reality); France after 1870 (Opera, Song, Instrumental Music, and Responses to the Polemics of Wagner/ism); Musical Exoticism and the Rise of the Modern (Gottschalk, Dvorák, Bizet, Albéniz, Debussy); and, finally, America's Search for High Culture and a National Musical Identity (Foster, Gottschalk, Paine, Ives, Amy Beach-and the Debates about Dvorák).
MUY 592 The Notation and Format of Music, 900-1600
Roger Freitas
The primary focus of this course will be to train the student in the various notations of early music. We will start with the earliest chant notations and then proceed through the earliest polyphonic notation, Franconian notation, Ars nova and Ars subtilior notations, and finish with white-note notation as it developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We will also consider issues of manuscript structure (codicology). At the end of the course, the student should be competent to work directly with the extant musical materials of the medieval and renaissance periods. Coursework will consist primarily of weekly assignments and reports; there will be a final examination.
MUY 592 Aesthetics and Music
Holly Watkins
This course will explore the critical possibilities of aesthetic theory, present and past, for the study of music. Beginning with current debates over the political and cultural relevance of aesthetics (and the "anti-aesthetic"), we will reflect on what a "science of the senses" is able to contribute in a postmodern era. Then we will turn to a number of central texts on aesthetics (including those of Kant, Hegel, and Adorno) in order to consider what these thinkers have to offer us today. Finally, we will apply our insights to specific repertories of music, asking what interpretive or critical aims a knowledge of aesthetic theory might serve.
Fall 2004
MUY 501 Introduction to Musicology
Daniel Zager
Introduction to Musicology, a required foundation course for musicology graduate students, is also open (by consent of the instructor) to other graduate students with an interest in the field of musicology and historical research. The course is devoted to historic and current understandings of musicology, with particular attention to how the discipline has expanded its scope and aims during the past two decades. The course also includes attention to selected bibliographic sources important to musicological inquiry and research.
MUY 591 Film Music: Critical Approaches
Michael Long
Since the first presentation of cinematographic images at the end of the nineteenth century, music has been a consistently present and consistently problematic element in cinema. Scorned or applauded (mainly the former) throughout the twentieth century by critics, audiences, aestheticians, composers, film directors, and music historians, film music in the past two decades has grown in significance as a field for historical, critical, and analytical conversations. As an object of study, however, film music poses some extraordinary difficulties for the "trained" musicologist or theorist, since the temporal, narrative, and technical aspects of film scoring impose substantial restraints upon the very musical processes we address in most of our academic discourse. The ephemeral nature of the film score as a form of musical writing, the acoustical space that music shares with non-musicale soundtrack elements, and the exigencies of film production and preservation complicate further our understanding of the musical "text" within a filmic environment.
In this seminar we will attempt to frame the acoustic and historical dimensions of film music, considering the techniques, methodologies, and vocabularies we might employ in our attempts to engage with and describe environments of film+sound. We will discuss period texts and the work of modern writers that address film music from historical, social, critical, and analytical perspectives. Since film music scholarship is necessarily grounded in repertorial awareness, we will be exploring a range of films in class, with particular attention to (1) the transition-to-sound period (the late 1920s and early 1030s); (2) film noir; (3) the film scores of Bernard Herrmann; (4) music, sound design, and mise-en-bande. However, student seminar projects will not be restricted to these areas of investigation.
MUY 591 The Cantata in Rome, ca. 1620-1670
Roger Freitas
A product of the experiments with monody that launched the baroque period in music, the cantata is perhaps the most characteristic genre of its age. Far cheaper to produce than opera or oratorio, and more esteemed than instrumental forms, the cantata served as the everyday entertainment of musically-inclined aristocrats; libraries and archives all over Europe preserve these works by the thousands. Yet they have received surprisingly little study (or performance). This seminar will explore the Italian chamber cantata in Rome, from its inception as a genre, through the works of Luigi Rossi, Giacomo Carissimi, and their contemporaries, to around 1670. We will consider the genre from poetic, stylistic, and social perspectives. In fact, these pieces have been so little investigated that virtually every project will constitute original research. Students will work extensively with facsimiles or microfilms of original manuscripts, and the seminar will be language-intensive (Italian), so some experience with Italian-or at least a Romance language-is desirable. There will be regular classroom presentations and a large final project.
MUY 591 Music of Hildegard von Bingen
Honey Meconi
The course examines the life and works of twelfth-century polymath and composer Hildegard von Bingen. Her music, its transmission, and its performance will be examined in the context of her cultural milieu and her achievements in poetry, religious thought, linguistics, medicine, natural science, and other areas.
Spring 2004
MUY 501 Introduction to Musicology
Ralph Locke
MUY 592 Josquin and his Contemporaries
Patrick Macey
Research on Josquin des Prez during the past decade has transformed our knowledge of his biography and patrons, and caused revision of views about the chronology and authenticity of his works. Topics to be explored include patronage at Milan, Rome, and Ferrara; comparative studies of music by Josquin's predecessors (Dufay, Ockeghem, Busnoys, Regis) and contemporaries (Compère, Obrecht); musico-rhetorical strategies; modal theory; humanism and text setting, and the question of musical genius. The focus will be on chansons and motets, with less emphasis on polyphonic Masses. Readings will be drawn from the work of H. M. Brown, Fallows, Lockwood, Sherr, Wegman, Litterick, L. Bernstein, Rifkin, the Merkleys, and C. C. Judd. Students will prepare several short papers during the course of the semester.
MUY 592 Theories of Rhetoric in 18th-Century Music
Gretchen Wheelock
MUY 592 19th-Century Opera
Ralph Locke
Italian opera was the core international genre in the 19th century, as it had been in the two previous centuries. This seminar examines the major composers (Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi), the stylistic and structural conventions that they established, elaborated, and, in various ways, exploited and, over the passing decades, sometimes resisted. Attention will be given also to how opera composers in other countries (e.g., Weber, Meyerbeer, Auber, Wagner, Bizet, Offenbach, Gilbert and Sullivan) negotiated the tensions between their own national operatic traditions and the Italian manner. The course will involve an exam about halfway through and a number of short-ish papers, rather than a single large one at the end.
Fall 2003
MUY 502 Introduction to Ethnomusicology
Ellen Koskoff
MUY 591 Fourteenth-Century Music: Theory and Practice
Gabriela Ilnitchi
In this class we will investigate the ways in which theory and compositional practice relate not only to each other but also to various other intellectual domains in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We will focus on the history of notational procedures as it was codified in theoretical treatises of the day-primarily in the French and Italian traditions-and particularly as it connects to schools of scientific thought, such as those found in Oxford and Paris. In addition, we will explore the manner in which contemporary music-theoretical, philosophical, and scientific concepts became embodied in the compositional practices and repertoires covered by terms such as "ars nova" and "ars subtilior," among others.
MUY 591 Music and Cultural Studies
Martin Scherzinger
This course is an introduction to basic themes in Cultural Studies and their implications for the study of music within global modernity. By raising questions that arise at the intersections of poststructuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism, the course will trace some of the ways that the critiques of representational theories of language, commodity fetishism, the intending subject, and Eurocentrism interrupt and intertwine with musical practice (performance/composition) as well as writing about music. Using the social theorists of the Frankfurt School as a point of departure, we will examine the concepts of the culture industry, mass culture, and popular culture and their perplexing and uneasy relations to musical modernism. This will involve a critical assessment of Adorno's model for structural listening, the limits of formalism no less than the various recent models that aim to point beyond these methodological limits. The course will then shift its focus to theories of ideology by exploring methods of musicological writing that bear the weight of ideological acknowledgment as well as the responsibility of ethical instantiation. The working of ideology will be examined under the rubric of various categories, e.g., music in the thought of modernist dialectics, gender and sexuality in music scholarship, music's role in the invention of the modern nation, and the politics of postcolonial musical thought.
MUY 591 Music and Ritual
Ellen Koskoff
An examination of ritual and the role it plays within various world music cultures. Readings will be drawn mainly from anthropology and ethnomusicology and will focus on ritual as a musical, dramatic event and process of transcendence, protest, and/or the display of cultural beliefs and values. Students will prepare a semester-long research or ethnographic project and will be assigned various oral presentations throughout the semester.
Spring 2003
MUY 592 The American Musical Theater
Kim Kowalke
A scholarly investigation of the American stage musical, surely the most representative international musico-dramatic genre of the 20th century. Topics will include historical development and repertory formation; problems of genre and definition; musico-dramatic structures and conventions; processes of adaptation and collaboration; performative strategies and dynamics; the blurring of "work" and "event"; social context/function and cultural work; lyric and musical styles and forms; critical/analytic approaches. Short presentations and medium-length paper.
MUY 592 Music, Society, and Culture in the 19th Century
Ralph Locke
Structured as a kind of "proseminar," this course looks not at a single repertoire or problem but at a number of different phenomena, repertoires, locales, etc. (during the century in question, or a bit beyond in either direction), and considers a variety of methodologies and interpretive approaches for dealing with each. Units (lasting a week or two each) may include The French Revolution and Its Musical Echoes; Impact of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; German and French Art Song; Primo Ottocento Opera; Program Music: Fertile Paradoxes (Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt); Virtuosity, Sentiment, and the Piano (Liszt, Chopin); America's Search for High Culture and a National Musical Identity; Brahms and Wagner; France after 1870: Instrumental Music and Responses to Wagner; and Musical Exoticism and the Rise of the Modern (e.g., Debussy).
The aim of the course is to represent/explore a number of key issues and genres, and expose the student to important scholarly writings, not to "cover," comprehensively, the music of the century and all good things that have been written about it. (Some preparatory listening and reading will be assigned for winter recess before the semester starts, helping a student fill in his/her gaps.) The course will involve oral presentations, short- and medium-length writing assignments, midterm and finals exams, but no article-length term paper.
MUY 592 Music and Patronage in the Renaissance
Patrick Macey
Strategies of patronage in 15th-century Italian centers such as Ferrara, Milan, Rome, and Florence will be explored. Topics will include recruitment and retention of singers and the development of musical repertories, including motetti missales in Milan, the Mass and motet in Ferrara and Rome, and secular and sacred music in Florence. The music of Josquin, Isaac, Compere, Weerbeke, and composers in the papal chapel will be covered, and the research of Lockwood, the Merkleys, R. Sherr, C. Reynolds, A. Roth, F. D'Accone and H. M. Brown will serve as the foundation for the course.
Fall 2002
MUY 501 Introduction to Musicology
Daniel Zager
MUY 591 Music, Gender and the Body
Ellen Koskoff
What, exactly, is gender? How does one's historical and geographic "place" help shape and define gender? How is one's gender performed in music through the body and in interaction with other bodies? This course examines ways in which various cultures construct notions of gender and body and how these are both reflected in and affect the music and musical practices of both men and women. Students will examine a wide range of theories about gender and the body and how they may be applied to Western and non-Western musical systems, such as Western classical and popular music, Indian religious music, Korean shaman traditions, and Indonesian court music. Readings will be drawn from anthropology, literary criticism, musicology, and popular music studies. Other assignments will include weekly discussions, a midterm exam, and a final paper.
MUY 591 Mozart's Operas
Gretchen Wheelock
MUY 591 Notation and Format of Music
Roger Freitas
Spring 2002
MUY 592 Josquin
Patrick Macey
MUY 592 Roman de Fauvel
Gabriela Ilnitchi
MUY 592 South Indian Music/Religion/Culture
Robert Morris and Douglas Brooks
Focusing on the classical music of the Karnatic traditions of south India, this course introduces the work of several of its greatest composers and develops a foundation for understanding the religious principles and cultural values that underlie Karnatic music. In addition to introducing south Indian melodic and rhythmic concepts and practices as exemplified in major compositional forms, we will develop an understanding of Vedic chanting, devotional or bhakti-oriented traditions of song and poetry, and the later important contributions to the theory of sound and music from Hindu Tantrism. Other topics such as the role of women in classical south Indian music tradition, performance genres and styles, and the living traditions will be addressed as well. No previous background is required or expected. Students will be expected to develop seminar research papers and present their findings a their essential contribution to the course.
Fall 2001
MUY 591 17th-Century Italian Opera
Jennifer Brown
In the fifty years since Joseph Kerman described the 17th century after Monteverdi as "the worst period of Italian opera"-the darkest of his "Dark Ages" of opera history-much ahs changed in opera scholarship. Even so, traces of Kerman's view persist, due perhaps to the enormous difficulties of conducting research in this field, a repertory of unparalleled richness. During this period composers learned to exploit the sweet sensuousness of the human voice and manipulate the resources of tonal harmony. This course will begin by exploring the earliest, most familiar phase of 17th-century opera history, tracing the emergence of opera alongside other, less familiar musical/theatrical genres. We will then move to Venice and chart the establishment of the first "tradition" of opera composition and performance. The final unit will examine the diffusion of the Venetian model throughout Italy and abroad. Issues to be examined along the way include: opera as performed vs. opera as notated; performance practice and production; revisions and borrowing; attribution and chronology; and the complex interactions of composers, librettists, singers, impresarios, and patrons. We will also analyze selected works by Monteverdi, Cavalli, Cesti, Sartorio, and others, and examine the analytical approaches of scholars such as Rosand, Walker, Heller, and McClary. Two short reports plus final research paper. Reading knowledge of Italian highly recommended.
MUY 591 Medieval/Renaissance Music Theory
Gabriela Ilnitchi
This seminar explores a variety of aspects of the history of music theory before 1600 and is appropriate for graduate students in musicology and music theory. (Crosslisted as TH 582).
MUY 591 Rhetoric in 18th-Century Music
Gretchen Wheelock