Department of Music Workshops

The identity of the Chicago graduate environment has historically been associated strongly with its famous research workshops in the humanities and social sciences.  Sponsored by the Council on Advanced Studies, the workshops aim to bring together faculty and graduate students both from the University of Chicago and the wider Chicago area to create scholarly dialogue and foster the exchange of ideas. In 2008-2009, a total of sixty-nine workshops are taking place on campus, ranging across a wide spectrum of interests and disciplines, many with interdisciplinary aims, including performance studies, cultural studies, political science, Latin American, American and European history, and art and politics of East Asia.

The “EthNoise!” workshop has grown directly out of the Department of Music and is run on a yearly basis by faculty and graduate students in the Ethnomusicology Program.  Other workshops have been founded, sponsored, or routinely attended by faculty and graduate students in the Department in cooperation with other Departments, notably the Early Modern Workshop, the Renaissance Workshop, the Anthropology of Europe Workshop, the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cultures Workshop, the Medicine, Practice, and Body Workshop, the Middle East History and Theory (MEHAT), the Social Theory Workshop, Western Mediterranean Cultures Workshop, and the Theory and Practice of South Asia (TAPSA) Workshop.  See http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/ for more information.

Currently, our postdoctoral fellow and instructor, Roger Moseley (PhD in Music, University of California at Berkeley, 2004), a musicologist and concert pianist, is leading an ad hoc, hands-on workshop on Historically Informed Improvisation, sponsored by the Department of Music.  The workshop has attracted instrumentalists and vocalists, both student and faculty, from across the University but especially from Music, who are working toward enhanced understanding of improvisation as musical process, tonal and atonal, and improvisation as historical practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.