Courses
Graduate Course Descriptions
Spring Quarter 2008
The time schedule for Spring quarter can be found here.
Music 30808. Perception & Understanding of Multimedia. B. Hoeckner. Spring.
Music 30901. Issues in Film Music. B. Hoeckner. Spring.
Music 31200. Tonal Analysis II. This course continues the explorations in advanced tonal analysis begun in Music 31100. The course will refine and extend students' skills in Schenkerian analysis, focusing in particular on issues raised by chromaticism, as well as larger-scale forms. We will also survey some non-Schenkerian analytical methodologies well-suited to the study of 19th-century harmony, including those of Kurth, Riemann, Bailey, Lewin, Harrison, and Cohn. S. Rings. Spring.
Music 31506. Modal Analysis. This course explores traditional musics of West and South Asia, with principal emphasis on the classical music of Iran, as modal systems. The main focus is on the Persian dastgah, with secondary emphasis on Arabic maqam and South Indian raga as concepts in theory and, more importantly, as guiding principles in performance. We will look at these musics from the perspective of their structure, but also examine their relationship to cultural contexts. We will try to discover the ways they are taught and learned and pay special attention to the role of modal principles in improvisational practice and improvised genres. Assignments will include some readings and listening to a modest number of recordings, and students will be asked to do some analytical assignments one or two of which should result in oral reports or short papers. No final exam. B. Nettl. Spring.
Music 32500. Proseminar in Seventeenth-Century Music [a.k.a. “Pro-Sem: Music 1600-1700”]. Course description: This proseminar deals with issues of context, aesthetics, repertory, and transmission in European music, 1600-1700. It takes both social and repertorial approaches to these problems. Although there is no specific prerequisite, students will have to engage musical settings of texts variously in Latin, Italian, French, German, Spanish (and English), for which in most cases translations are available. There will be student reports on source and secondary readings and on pieces, depending upon the week. Students will also have a transcription assignment. A take-home final will be given out in Week 10. Readings may be as long as 150 pgs/wk, and listenings/score study may take several hours/wk. A special feature will be the study of some five operas on the story of Orpheus and Euridice. These works will be discussed after the break in even-numbered weeks, in the second part of class. R. Kendrick. Spring.
Music 32600. Pro-seminar: Music 1700-1800. This course is designed to acquaint students with the most salient issues and scholarship on 18th-century European music. Each week one or several works will be harnessed to study of a particular topic in 18th-century historiography, which, together with relevant readings (primary and secondary), will form the starting point for class discussion. Readings are intended to help students gain a sense of how different historical approaches have shaped views of 18th-century repertory and the practice of studying 18th-century music history. By the end of the course, students should have a more secure footing in the music of the period as well as some fluency in issues that have occupied scholars= attentions in the past and present, thereby shaping the 18th century as a scholarly field. The course is not a survey, but it does follow some chronological trajectories in helping students develop canons of musical knowledge and critical perspectives in 18th-century musicological studies.
All class meetings consist of analytical discussion of the required readings, often entailing comparison of two or more divergent viewpoints, as well as study of repertory. Repertorial study is not analytical in the sense of teaching techniques of analysis, but rather seeks to acquaint students with a variety of historical, generic, analytic, and contextual approaches.
At each session two or more students will serve as discussion leaders for the readings. Discussion leaders will start off the discussion by presenting what they view as the central arguments and research problems raised by the readings at hand and identifying the main faultlines in them. A sense of class community is vital to this course, beginning with the first session. M. Feldman. Spring.
Music 35800. Acoustics/Tuning Theory. E. Blackwood. Spring.
Music 42208. Eclecticism. T. Jackson. Spring.
Music 43008. Stravinsky. No composer of recent times has seemed to have as many differing voices as did Igor Stravinsky. Whether heard as an avant-garde modernist, a Russian primitivist, a neo-classical conservative, or a would-be Webernian serialist, Stravinsky has seemingly donned the hat of virtually every major compositional movement of the early 20th century. It is not surprising, then, that music historians and theorists confronting this vast and diverse body of music have had recourse to a bewildering variety of analytic approaches. At the same time, each of Stravinsky’s stylistic moves provoked intense debates among the critics regarding issues of aesthetics, modernism, and formalism.
In this seminar, we will consider some recent (and not so recent) attempts to come to grips with Stravinsky’s music. We’ll begin with some of Stravinsky’s early “Russian” ballets and consider them in light of several classic analytic studies by Arthur Berger, Boris Asaf’ev, Pieter van den Toorn, and Edward Cone concerning problems of harmonic language, rhythmic and metric deformations, melodic accent, and formal stratification. (Richard Taruskin’s major studies of octatonicism and folk influences upon early Stravinsky will also be indispensable.) Next we’ll turn to Stravinsky’s neo-classical music, and consider some of its aesthetic (and perhaps reactionary) ramifications as revealed in classic responses by Adorno, Schenker, Schoenberg and Boulez. At the same time, we’ll not neglect some of the special analytic problems posed by Stravinsky’s peculiar style of neo-tonal writing. Studies by Joseph Straus, Gretchen Horlacher, and Charles Joseph will be helpful here. Finally, we’ll consider the composer’s move late in his life to serialism. Was this a truly organic evolution, or was it motivated (as Richard Taruskin has darkly suggested) by other, more sinister ideological factors? To what extent can his unusual solution of serial arrays be heard as a Russian response to the formidable legacy of Schoenberg and Webern?
These are all large questions, needless to say. And it is not possible, of course, to answer any of them with any pretense of comprehensiveness in the ten weeks we will have together. Still, it is clear that any understanding of Stravinsky’s music can come only through a combination of analytical and historical perspectives. To this end, each week we will take a single work of Stravinsky and use that as our focus piece through which to filter appropriate analytic models and critical reactions. The course will thus be doubly a seminar in the analysis of Stravinsky’s music as well as a history of Stravinsky reception in the 20th century.
In addition to keeping up with regularly assigned readings and score study, students in the course will be required to lead selected class discussions, offer periodic short reports, and write an article review and final seminar paper. T. Christensen. Spring.
Music 43408. Music and Emotion. The close connection between music and emotion is one that has been remarked upon since antiquity, and there are any number of books and articles that engage with the relationship between the two. This tradition of interest and inquiry has not, however, led to definitive conclusions on the relationship between music and emotion, and it is this curious situation—as well as a thoughtful consideration of ways to move beyond it—that shall be the focus of this seminar.
Our first group of readings will concentrate on recent literature on the psychological and physiological bases of emotion by Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, and others. The second group will focus on empirical studies of music and emotion (by John Sloboda, Klaus Scherer, Carol Krumhansl, and others), and the third on the relationship between culture and emotion (with special attention to how this relationship is expressed through musical practice, a matter recently considered by Judith Becker). The last portion of the seminar will explore a methodology for analyzing relationships between emotion concepts and musical materials based on my recent work on sonic analogs. The seminar will conclude with a mini-conference in which seminaristas will present their own research. L. Zbikowski. Spring.
Music 44808. The New Christology and Sacred Music in the Fifteenth Century [a.k.a. “Fifteenth Century Polyphony”]. In this seminar, we will explore a number of sacred masses and motets of the fifteenth century by examining the intensified literary, artistic, and ritual portrayals of Christ that emerged in the late middle ages.
Christ’s connection with the world is made ever clearer in the fifteenth century. He is humanized as a highly vocal participant in 15th-century theological writing (late medieval passion treatises, dialogues, sermons, lives of Christ, dramas), his “family tree” is firmly established at this time, depictions of him are conceived in increasingly graphic ways, and his body is concretized and ritualized through the establishment of new feasts. In the realm of literature, works such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Thomas à Kempis’ Orations and Meditations on the Life of Christ, and the Middle-High German Christ and the Loving Soul are among the many that reveal an intimate, approachable Christ. So, too, scores of images in mystical treatises and elsewhere combine Christological themes in ways heretofore unknown, thereby increasing the intensity of the viewer’s experience. In particular, the “Distress of God” (Notgottes or Pitié-de-Nostre-Seigneur) motif, a favorite of the musically inclined Burgundian dukes, conflates the traditional Man of Sorrows image with the Trinity to illustrate not only the suffering Christ but also the compassion of God the Father and the Holy Spirit. New celebrations of the fifteenth century, for example, the feast of the body of Christ (Corpus Christi), provided the ritual framework within which music related to all these developments could flourish.
A substantive body of masses and motets relating to these themes has been largely overlooked, precisely because their Christological features and their significance in light of these literary, artistic, and ceremonial developments have not been recognized. Christological works with vernacular tenors have all but gone undetected. By identifying these pieces and exploring the extraordinary emotion contained in them, we can begin to redefine the word “devotional” and illuminate the beginnings of affective expression in sacred music.
Weekly directed readings will explore these issues, and papers will center on contextualization of individual pieces. Working knowledge of Latin and/or one or more vernacular languages is useful, but since many of the texts to be covered can be scanned for key words and phrases, fluency is not required. A. Robertson. Spring.
Winter Quarter 2008
The time schedule for Winter Quarter 2008 can be found here.
Music 31100. The Analysis of Tonal Music. In this course, fundamental tools of tonal analysis will be introduced and applied to a variety of repertoires. In particular, we will look at Schenker’s influential theory of linear analysis, and begin to master its principles and applications. But this will not simply be a course in Schenkerian theory; we’ll also consider the limits of that theory and attempt to supplement it where possible with other perspectives drawn from diverse traditions of motivic analysis, functionality, Formenlehre, and recent examples of “critical” analysis. Note: 311 is conceived as a preparation and foundation for Music 312, which will follow in the Spring semester, and which will build directly upon the analytic models and repertoire introduced in 311. T. Christensen. Winter.
Music 32700. Proseminar in Nineteenth-Century Music. This proseminar will survey the vast terrain of nineteenth-century European music with the aim of exploring correspondences and discrepancies between the field and the concepts through which it has been mapped. In addressing the repertoire and the cultural forces that both shaped and issued from it, we will engage with the multifarious relationships between nineteenth-century composers, poets, impresarios, publishers, performers, and audiences. When dealing with the historical and critical literature, we will negotiate between philology and the ineffable, virtuosity and the work concept, form and mystery, convention and idiosyncrasy, organicism and the aesthetic of the fragment, private and public social domains, sacralized opera and dramatic church music, memory and futurism, cities and landscapes, elitism and populism, etc. There will be weekly reading (up to 150 pages) and listening (up to 1 hour) assignments on which students will give reports and/or presentations. R. Moseley. Winter.
Music 36901. The Musical Language of Toru Takemitsu. This course explores the music of Toru Takemitsu. He is undoubtedly among the world most important Japanese composers whose work is recognized for his sensitivity to tone-color and his unique synthesis of Western innovations with Japanese tradition. We will closely examine his early works to his last work, “Air” for flute. Among other works to be analyzed are his Requiem, November Steps, Autumn, Rain Coming, Quotation of Dream, Rain Tree Sketch, Archipelago S, Waves, Fantasma/Cantos II, A way a lone, as well as his works for films. K. Suzuki. Winter.
Music 44408. Research Seminar: Film Music, Modernism, and Modernity. This research seminar will explore how film music has participated in processes of modernity and how it has contributed to the cinematic manifestation of modernism. We will be concerned primarily with American cinema from the 1910s through the 1950s, that is, from the heyday of the silent era through the period of so-called classical Hollywood. We will consider film music’s involvement with modernity through issues of production and exhibition, looking, for example, at the creation of a “library of film music” through mood music collections, the standardization of performance, the role of the film composer in the studio system, and theories of film music. We will examine music’s contribution to film as a manifestation of vernacular (not high) modernism, by looking specifically at the role music played in cinematic representations of modernity. We will analyze at least one film score in great detail using the original conductor’s score—a rare feat. Weekly readings and screenings will go hand in hand with smaller projects. Films to be screened will include The Thief of Baghdad, Dishonored, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, as well as musicals by Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire. Participants will present a formal paper during a mini-conference at the end of the quarter. F 9:00-11:50 a.m. JRL 264. Screenings: T 7:00-10:00 p.m. JRL 264. B. Hoeckner. Winter.
Music 45008. Opera and Image. This course explores the methodologies and terminologies of the field of iconography as they can be applied to opera. We will talk about the visual aspects of opera---stage gesture, verbal images, sets and costumes, local color, and even the temporal design of the libretto—and how they interact with the music and may also be understood, to use Tillman Seebass’s words, “as paradigm[s] for a given culture.” The initial classes will establish basic theoretical principles that generate from art history, theatre, and musicology, and introduce essential sources and reference tools. Specific topics to be addressed are the “diabolus in musica,” voyeurism, the performer as hero, icons, film (“Regie-cinema”), synaesthesia, tableau and gesture, and time and space. Works to be discussed include Der Freischütz, Faust (Spohr), Il Sant’Alessio, Die Zauberflöte, Zelmira, Fidelio, Wozzeck, Salome, A Quiet Place, Madama Butterfly, La Traviata, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Les Troyens, and Turandot. Students will engage with a large body of literature that cuts across chronologies and disciplines. Assignments include readings, short presentations relevant to weekly topics, and a term paper, which will be presented in one of the final classes of the quarter. Foreign language skills a plus, but not a requirement. H. Greenwald. Winter.
