Beyond the Classroom
In addition to coursework across the the sub-disciplines of music, students may (and are often encouraged) to supplement their studies with courses in other departments throughout the University. Outside of the classroom, conferences, workshops, and seminars, both at the University and at other institutions, offer an invaluable setting for critical inquiry and a scholarly exchange of ideas.
The Center’s concert series provides a space for student composers to develop and showcase new work, performed by the resident Grossman Ensemble and various guest artists specializing in new music, and it features a number of graduate student-led projects each season. A cadre of distinguished guest composers present new works on the series each year as well, offering composition students further opportunities to engage with and learn from the greatest creators of contemporary music.
SPIL is a vibrant hub for composers of electronic music and sound at the University of Chicago, offering an exploratory space for electronic music, composition, and intermedia practices. Comprising three studios and hosting performances like Critical Sounds, SPIL fosters collaboration across disciplines both on campus and in Chicago.
Sponsored by the Department of Music and supported by the University of Chicago Council on Advanced Studies, EthNoise! is an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students, faculty, and guests to share and discuss ongoing research projects. Our mission is to foster dialogue about recent research at the intersection of music, language, and culture. While music is the thread uniting all of the workshop’s presentations, our speakers come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including ethno/musicology, history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and more. Our participants also draw on a variety of methodological approaches, including ethnography and archival analysis. The workshop is open to the public and meets on Thursdays from 5:00 PM–6:30 PM online, unless announced otherwise.
The 20th and 21st Century Workshop (C20/21) provides a space for graduate students and faculty members across the humanities to present and discuss work in progress that engages aesthetic and cultural objects produced in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as their associated contexts, reception, and theoretical problems. While the workshop is open to a variety of disciplinary approaches across the humanities, it is primarily organized around conceptual questions specific to this historical period, including: modernism and its strengths/weaknesses/alternatives; attempts at and troubles with interpreting the contemporary; colonialism and its afterlives; histories of the disciplines and other knowledge formations; and the changing position of the arts in relation to mass culture. The workshop meets on alternate Mondays from 3:00 PM–4:20 PM on Zoom.
Established in 2011, the Music & Sound Workshop (formerly the Sound and Society Workshop) began as a place to forge conversations between scholars about the histories, structures, and cultures of various musical practices in the West. Since then, the scope of music studies has increased exponentially, not only reaching to understand the new venues, politics, and economies of music in the 21st century but reimagining the very definitions of music and redefining its relationships to “sound,” “noise,” and “silence.” The Music & Sound Workshop is a hub for students and faculty who analyze sound—in its many discursive guises—across the Humanities and Social Sciences at UChicago. Our workshop examines sound’s multiple facets, which include material, music-historical, music-analytical, technological, filmic, environmental, perceptual, and social perspectives. Following Jonathan Sterne, members of a diverse array of fields—from anthropology to animal studies—can be “sound students,” and thus we embrace unique and varied presentation formats, objects of study, and approaches. The Music & Sound Workshop is generously supported by the University of Chicago Center for Advanced Study.
Student and faculty composers meet weekly for composition seminars to discuss issues related to musical materials, imagination, design, aesthetics, and compositional techniques with leaders in the field from across the globe.