2019-2020

Listening to trans*, raced, and castrato voices, "Errant Voices: Gender and Performances beyond Measure" will explore voices that escape their confines perforce or by choice, trying to make sense of resistant, insurgent, and resilient voices. Students from various disciplines are invited to join the seminar, thereby helping to advance its themes but working from their own strengths and orientations. Our common goal will be to develop shared theoretical language among differing cases that can lead to new insights into wider paradigmatic shifts across gender and race in our historical moment. The project turns on performances inasmuch as they reveal the workings of bodies, intentions, and interactions. It depends on collective thinking because it is intersectional and thus concerns emergent shared languages developed by encountering questions collaboratively.

The composition seminar is a weekly session designed for graduate students in composition. It is an open forum for composers to listen to recent music, including their own, and to discuss issues connected with trends, esthetics, and compositional techniques. The entire composition faculty takes part in these sessions. The composition seminar often hosts well-known visiting composers whose works are performed in the city by various groups or ensembles, as well as performers specializing in new music and contemporary techniques.

Ethnographic methods generally pertain to the principal qualitative research methods of participant observation, fieldnote writing, ethnographic interviewing, and the ethnographer's participation in music and dance as formal and informal processes for the study of musical actions and behaviors. This seminar examines these methods, while critically considering the central connections between methods and the ethics of fieldwork and ethnographic representation as related to ethnographic intent, researcher reflexivity, notions of power and privilege, authority, hearing and representing individual voices, and politics of positionality, which refers to the ethnographer's conduct throughout the research and writing process. Selected ethnomusicological and anthropological scholarship on ethnography and (recent) musical ethnographies highlight such ethical concerns and responsibilities while introducing fieldwork settings, analytical renderings, and theoretical framing. Focusing on ethnography as methodological practice, and as text, this seminar includes writing labs to practice processes of data analysis, interpretation, and the transformation of field data into written and other ethnographic representations. The seminar further introduces fieldwork technology, visual sociology/ethnography, filmmaking, and examples of virtual ethnographic presentation and dissemination. Focusing on how scholars represent musical experiences further exposes methods and theories of critical ethnography, auto-ethnography, and performance ethnography while highlighting examples of music-making that center not only on artistic activity but also on social interactions.

This course looks at themes and moments of music in Europe and the European abroad, with some comparisons of other musical traditions. Students will engage source readings, notation/improvisation, and cultural contexts, along with trans-continental links and disjunctures. Requirements include: dealing with sources, one class report, a mock single-sheet exam, and a take-home final. It is possible that we might interact with the Haymarket Opera Company's production of Monteverdi's *Poppea* in June.

This course is a continuation of Music 31100, a study of advanced techniques in tonal analysis. Much of our work will center on Schenkerian theory, but we will also place Schenkerian approaches in dialogue with other methods, including recent approaches to Formenlebre, schema theory, and neo-Riemannian theory. We will be interested in exploring the intersections (and frictions) between these diverse analytical methods, seeking at once to develop analytical fluency in each of them and to heighten our sensitivity to the methodological issues involved in a pluralist approach to tonal analysis.

This is a yearlong course in ear training, keyboard progressions, realization of figured basses at the keyboard, and reading of chamber and orchestral scores. Classes each week consist of one dictation lab (sixty minutes long) and one keyboard lab (thirty minutes long).

Electronic Music I presents an open environment for creativity and expression through composition in the electronic music studio. The course provides students with a background in the fundamentals of sound and acoustics, covers the theory and practice of digital signal processing for audio, and introduces the recording studio as a powerful compositional tool. The course culminates in a concert of original student works presented in multi-channel surround sound. Enrollment gives students access to the Electronic Music Studio in the Department of Music. No prior knowledge of electronic music is necessary.

Designed for beginning composers to practice and hone the nuances of their musical craft, this course introduces some of the fundamentals of music composition through a series of exercises as well as several larger creative projects. Professional musicians will perform students' exercises and compositions. This is primarily a creative, composing course. Through a combination of composition assignments, listening, discussion, analysis, and reading, we will explore and practice the fundamental aspects of music composition. Repertoire study, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, orchestration, timbre, form, transformation, and several other pertinent essentials are included in the curriculum. This laboratory-style, practical course is interactive and discussion-based.

This course focuses on the knowledge necessary to improvise over the chord changes of standard jazz tunes. We cover basic terminology and chord symbols, scale-to-chord relationships, connection devices, and turn-around patterns. For the more experienced improviser, we explore alternate chord changes, tritone substitutions, and ornamentations. Using techniques gained in class, students write their own solos on a jazz tune and transcribe solos from recordings. All instruments are welcome, and students should write to the instructor prior to the first class to let them know their instrument.