Courses

Current Time Schedule

The schedule for Autumn Quarter 2009, listing the meeting times for specific classes, can be found here.

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

For Undergraduate Course Descriptions, please see the College Course Catalog listing (PDF).

Graduate Course Descriptions

Spring Quarter 2009

The time schedule for Spring quarter can be found here.

Music 30300. The History and Literature of Electro-Acoustic Music. Many musical visionaries have at one time or another declared that the liberation of music was partly (or entirely) linked to the growth of electronic technology.  Whether you accept or reject that notion, there is no denying that electricity, electronic and computer technology has had a profound and irrevocable impact on the aesthetics, economics, and social forces which drive and respond to musical innovation.  We will endeavor to examine the history and literature of electro-acoustic music and the instruments that produce it from primitive beginnings at the end of the 19th Century to the present day with special emphasis on the second half of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st.  We will listen, read and discuss much. Controversy is not only welcome, but expected.  H. Sandroff. Spring.

Music 31300. Analysis of 20th Century Music. This course offers an intensive study in analytical and theoretical approaches to 20th- century art music. Students will develop fluency in the analytical and theoretical tools that typically fall under the rubric of “set theory”—the lingua franca of post-tonal analysis in the Anglo-American academy—and explore the ways in which that apparatus can be applied profitably in the analysis of diverse 20th-century repertories. We will seek to foster a critical awareness of both the virtues and limits of set-theoretic approaches, employing alternative means of discussing the music at hand when that is warranted. In addition to readings— which will be drawn both from the scholarly literature and from texts on post-tonal theory— coursework will consist of weekly assignments (including problem sets), brief analytical presentations, a midterm, a final, and a final paper. S. Rings. Spring.

Music 32400. Pro-Seminar: Renaissance Music. In this seminar we will examine the musical repertory between 1400 and 1600, within the cultural context of the period, with considerable attention devoted to the analysis of the music and its compositional techniques, taking into account the thoughts of contemporary theorists. We will explore questions of periodization, the setting of temporal boundaries for "Renaissance music" as influenced by changing trends in historiography.   We will study notation, as well as performance practice.  Students will engage in a critical examination of the important issues and debates in the current literature. C. Elias. Spring.

Music 33800. Ethnographic Methods. This course is designed to equip graduate students with methodological and epistemological tools for doing ethnographic fieldwork focused on lived musical experience. The organization of topics will unfold over three stages, beginning with a prefield emphasis on research design, politics, and ethics (April), followed by an infield focus on skill sets and media for participating in, observing, and documenting expressive culture (May), and ending with a postfield spotlight on relationships, rights, responsibilities, stakes, and representational strategies that extend beyond infield encounters (June). Key readings in anthropology, ethnomusicology, sociology, and folklore will be discussed in class along with individual works in progress. In addition to clarifying concepts and methods related to ethnographic inquiry, we will also reflect critically on the kind of knowledge we authorize as musical anthropologists, the people whom this knowledge concerns and serves, the protocols for its use, and how our individual subjectivities––our differences of gender, sexual orientation, class, race, ethnicity, faith,nationality––shape the interpretive process. K. Mason. Spring.

Music 42109. The Noise of the Imperial City. The soundscapes of empire converge in the cities of empire to unleash a complex cacophony and counterpoint of colonial encounter, appropriation, and subversion. Center and periphery collapse in upon themselves, transforming the traditional arts of power and powerlessness into modern mixes, in which history’s telos falters before the avant-garde and edge of multiple modernisms and postmodernisms. The cosmopolitan noise the imperial city remixes contains the sounds of the local and the global, the classical monumentality of the colonial capital and the postcolonial experimentation of the displaced.

Through our encounter with the “noise of the imperial city” in this CDI seminar, we seek new ways to make the modern forms of nation-state and empire audible and meaningful. The ten weeks of the seminar stretch across five pairs of ten imperial cities, linked through a process of “sounding and resounding,” that is, the call-and-response of self and other, past and present: London and Calcutta; Vienna and Istanbul; Berlin and Jerusalem; Paris and Buenos Aires; Chicago and Baghdad. The theoretical approaches to the encounter with empire will unfold across these soundscapes through weekly examinations of the links between the local urban neighborhood, on one hand, and the processes of global cultural exchange, on the other.

In the seminar we seek to perceive and interpret noise as the evidence for multiple forms of expression—the sounds of religion and resistance, music and machines, languages and literature, the arts and human agency. Students will have the opportunity in their own projects to focus upon imperial cities and to emphasize the artistic and representational forms of their own choosing. To reflect the multiple subjectivities that characterize the imperial city, we shall ourselves mix the theoretical approaches of aesthetics, ethnography, and history. We therefore welcome students from across the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Divinity School. P. Bohlman, L. Koch. Spring.

Music 42909. Musical Instruments in Cultural Context. At first glance, musical instruments take the form of purely material objects. Not surprisingly, most instrument classification systems represent them in this way. Though such systems may be necessary for the initial ways in which we describe instruments, they present only part of the picture of what they really mean within culture.

In this proseminar, the additional aspects of making instruments, their use of material substances, the aesthetics of sound, performance techniques, and documentation will also serve as our subject. All of these will guide us as pose questions about the relation between the musical instrument and society. The discipline of musical archeology, which concerns itself primarily with the study of archeological artifacts and iconography, will also lead us to consider interdisciplinary aspects that will contribute to the critical methods of ethnomusicology. L. Koch. Spring.

Music 43509: Musical Time. Music is often reckoned to be a supremely temporal art, but the characterization seems to have as much to do with the conception, composition, and performance of instrumental music in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as it does with the material reality of the cultural products typically gathered under the rubric of “music.” In this seminar we shall open up the topic of musical time to a fresh investigation, drawing on the way musical time has been organized in a variety of cultural contexts, on recent research in cognitive science (especially on memory function), and on some of the perspectives provided by the cognitive grammar of music that I am currently developing. We shall, of course, place this investigation within the historical context provided by works such as Jonathan Kramer’s The Time of Music (1988) and David Epstein’s Shaping Time (1995), as well as Stockhausen’s essays on time from the late 1950s, but most of our effort will be directed to developing a conception of musical time adequate to current interests. With such interests in mind we shall explore a fairly wide range of repertoire, but with a special emphasis on works written during the past fifty years. L. Zbikowski. Spring.

Music 44900. Seminar: The Roman de Fauvel: A new look. Since the days of the publication of the facsimile edition of the Roman de Fauvel with musical interpolations (Paris, BNF, fr. 146) in 1990 and of the Fauvel conference held in Paris in 1994 (proceedings published in 1998), new work that promises to shed important light on the manuscript has appeared. Monographs by Dillon (2002) on music and visuality, Butterfield (2002) on poetry and music, Muir (2005) on ritual in early modern Europe, and Gaposchkin (2008) on the cult of St. Louis and kingship in the fourteenth century all suggest fresh avenues of investigation into this multi-dimensional book. Likewise, recent articles on subjects as diverse as 13th- and 14th-c bestiaries, dance songs, mirrors of princes, moralizing poetry, apocalypticism, the Knights Templar, patronage, and late medieval folklore point to ways of approaching the underlying meaning(s) of this Gesamtkunstwerk of the middle ages.

Our seminar will begin with these and other writings as we attempt to address the many outstanding questions about Paris, BNF, fr. 146. Among other topics, readings and eventually papers might focus on the liturgy embedded in Fauvel, the ordering of specific sub-sections, the local (or not) nature of indigenous practices described in the manuscript, the message of the book to its audience(s), and the unsuspected connections between this singular source and other contemporaneous ones. A. Robertson. Spring.

Music 45309. Aspects of Verdi’s creative process in Il trovatore and Un ballo in maschera. Since the 1980s critical editions of the works of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi have made available to scholars a large amount of information concerning these composers’ compositional habits and procedures. We now understand that 19th-century opera composition involved an intellectual effort comparable to that required for the composition of a symphony or a quartet. The study and separate edition of sketches and drafts for Verdi’s La traviata, for instance, allow us to follow the genesis of the opera in all its phases, from the early ideas and the drafting of the libretto up to the complete musical composition with its staging.

This seminar will begin with an overview of our present knowledge of the opera composers’ compositional procedures, comparing these with what we know of the compositional process used by composers like Mozart and Beethoven. We will then turn to the specific problems of transcribing and interpreting Verdi’s autograph sketches and drafts, with examples from Alzira, Rigoletto, and La traviata. The main part of the seminar will deal with yet-unpublished documents concerning two of Verdi’s middle-period masterworks: Il trovatore (1853, of which a critical edition was published in 1992, before the related sketches were available), and Un ballo in maschera (1859, for which the critical edition is still in preparation). We will examine in detail the working materials for some of the main sections of these works, and students will be asked to transcribe other sections as a basis for seminar discussion. F. Della Seta. Spring.

Winter Quarter 2009

The time schedule for Winter quarter can be found here.

Music 23700/33700. Music of South Asia. This is a foundational course on historical, creative, and social dynamics of musical practices in South Asian cultural frames of reference. Drawing on classical Indian aesthetic theory and contemporary ethnography, participants develop ways of thinking about stylistic features of musical idioms, intersections with other performing arts, and political economies of music in diverse geographical locations. From Sri Lanka and South India, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, North India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, to multiple diasporas––issues of identity and difference are brought into focus around lived musical experience. Key topics include faith and spirituality, patrons and performers, gender and sexuality, colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism, regionalism, modernity, old and new media, vernacular and epic storytelling traditions, musical transmission, social inequalities, subaltern historiography, and public culture. Arenas of performance range from feudal courts and salons, to places of worship and life cycle events, to music schools, public concerts, radio stations, recording studios, commercial film industries, satellite music television, cosmopolitan world stages, and popular music scenes on and offline. Readings in anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore, cultural studies and history are complemented with opportunities for learning about the social life of South Asian music in Chicago. K. Mason. Winter.

Music 30809. Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Music. This course focuses on the analysis of music of the second half of the eighteenth century (with forays into the first half as necessary), and specifically on works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The course will also provide an introduction to Schenkerian analysis. Assignments will include harmonic reductions and linear analyses of short works or selected passages from the target repertoire, as well as three or four short analytical papers. L. Zbikowski. Winter.

Music 31300. Analysis of 20th-Century Music. This course offers an intensive study in analytical and theoretical approaches to 20th- century art music. Students will develop fluency in the analytical and theoretical tools that typically fall under the rubric of “set theory”—the lingua franca of post-tonal analysis in the Anglo-American academy—and explore the ways in which that apparatus can be applied profitably in the analysis of diverse 20th-century repertories. We will seek to foster a critical awareness of both the virtues and limits of set-theoretic approaches, employing alternative means of discussing the music at hand when that is warranted. In addition to readings— which will be drawn both from the scholarly literature and from texts on post-tonal theory— coursework will consist of weekly assignments (including problem sets), brief analytical presentations, a midterm, a final, and a final paper. S. Rings. Winter.

Music 42709. Engaging Ethno/musicology. What is the role, historically and in the present moment, of the intellectual in society? What are the ethics of witnessing the lives of those with whom we share human relationships in the field/world and whose (musicking) life experiences form one basis for the knowledge we generate? More than a crisis of representation in ethnography, the discipline is being called into question by people responding to de rigueur models of reciprocity that previously served to answer issues of accountability. Indeed, the very relevance of the established role of higher education is being challenged by the inequities that often exist between institutions and the communities in which they are located. To what extent is our intellectual praxis responsible to the sociopolitical realities outside of the academy? What is “necessary knowledge” (the motto of the Social Science Research Council) and how should we respond to anthropologist Daniel Mato’s call to create “methods that seek to articulate the production of knowledge with social change.”

Recently, ethno/musicologists have been debating more openly and earnestly issues of intellectual and social responsibility in their work, leading many to examine core disciplinary values, assumptions, and methods. More than “applied” or “public sector” work, these scholars have been dialogically responding and shaping their projects to be responsive to the needs of communities and issues of social justice. How do we negotiate the politics of engagement, advocacy and activism in our work? Where is the border between human concern and accountability and a compromising political action?

In this seminar, we will examine these debates in music studies and see how neighboring disciplines like anthropology, sociology and political science have addressed these concerns through frames of applied work, community-service learning, Participatory Action Research (to name a few). Additionally, we will push further and consider the Higher Ed Institution as an agentive social actor with similar responsibilities. More than a theoretical discussion, this seminar itself seeks to be a praxis of engagement, collaborating outside of the university within local South Side and Chicago communities. E. Usner. Winter.

Music 43600. The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Music. This course will examine the theoretical foundations of musical acoustics, the generation, propagation and perception of sound. Students will have the opportunity to examine acoustical and psycho-acoustical theory as it applies to their area of specialization in composition, musicology, ethno-musicology and music theory through a series of lectures, experiments, laboratory demonstrations and group/ individual projects. H. Sandroff. Winter.

Music 44109/English 42100/CDII 41500. Composing Humans, CA. 1760-1840. This course, offered through the Center for Disciplinary Innovation, will demonstrate and sponsor new approaches to the late-Enlightenment question of Aesthetic Education in several European contexts, not just that of Schiller’s famous “Letters” on the subject in 1795 but also related versions of the concept in Scotland, England, Germany, Austria, France, and Italy. We aim to bring together musicological and literary-historical approaches to the post-Enlightenment moment when both music and literature began to be understood as playing a major role in the cultivation, even the constitution, of full humanity. The seminar will proceed by way of a series of case studies that draw on the fields of literature, poetry, music, song, and performance, each involving an issue, new or newly posed in the period, about arts and "anthropology"--a term that, with Kant and others, acquired special force in the late eighteenth century. J. Chandler. M. Feldman. Winter.

Music 45109. Opera and Cultural Transfer. During its 400-year long history, opera has contributed to exchange between different cultures to a remarkable extent. From the introduction of the first Italian operas into German- and French-speaking milieux in the seventeenth century to Luciano Pavarotti’s triumphant debut in Beijing with La Bohème (1986), opera composers, librettists, managers, and performers have been the protagonists of numerous tales of cultural transfer. To this date, scholars have dealt extensively with numerous and highly significant case studies (Italian opera at the Viennese Imperial Court, Handel in London, Wagner in Italy, Verdi in America, etc), but have not yet attempted a broad consideration of the phenomenon. Furthermore, the focus has often been on texts (verbal and musical) and their transformation, rather than on the individuals responsible for or involved in the cultural transfer of opera.

This seminar begins with an examination of extant theories and studies of cultural transfer (including significant non-musicological writings), and subsequently turns to a discussion of operatic cultural transfer, concentrating in particular on the circulation of composers, performers, and individual works; the adaptation of foreign literary sources as libretti; the clash and hybridization of locale-specific genres when they came in contact with new cultural contexts; and the political, economic, and institutional ramifications of the circulation of opera. Throughout the semester we will seek primarily to investigate people and issues. A rigorous approach to textual matters, however, will be essential in order to identify and investigate cultural themes. One central concern will be the posibility (and difficulty) of developing a unified methodology for an integrated study of opera and cultural transfer. F. Izzo. Winter.