Autumn

During the five three-hour sessions of the Dissertation Chapter Seminar each quarter, Ph.D. students in their fourth and fifth years will have the opportunity to share strategies for writing up their dissertations during the years of most intensive research. We shall work collectively to develop these strategies, investigating the on-the-ground research work that students bring to the DCS from the early stages of research to the completion of chapters in preparation for the dissertation-completion year. Each session will begin with a discussion of research-to-writing strategies, and it will conclude with discussion in the seminar of one or two pre-circulated chapters by students in the DCS. Ph.D. students who are not in residence during their fourth and fifth years, because they are conducting research or no longer in residence in Chicago, will participate remotely. The DCS provides students an opportunity for a sustained and supportive dissertation-writing workshop for Ph.D. students in Music.

The Colloquium is a series of lectures followed by discussion and normally given by speakers from other institutions who are specially invited by the Music Department to share their recent research or compositions with students and faculty. All lectures take place on Friday afternoons.

The class will survey and discuss recent aesthetic positions and examine their influence on 20th century music and on current compositional activities. Besides some of the classics of modern aesthetic theory (Adorno/Horckheimer, Derrida, Butler, Deleuze, Zaid) some more recent essays will be read and we will elaborate on contexts, connections, and contradictions of the texts. An important part of the course will be discussions about the relevance of the aesthetic positions surveyed for contemporary music and for our own positions as artists in today’s political situation.

This seminar will explore contemporary debates on how music has been thought to define, divide, precede, and exceed, the category of the human. In an epoch theorized at once as a universalizing “Anthropocene,” and at other times as the socially stratifying “Capitalocene”; and in an intellectual moment in which notions of uniquely human creative capacities are questioned both by a growing literature in animal studies, and by an insistence that large language models are capable of equivalent (or analogous) creative production, must we—“humanists” in the academy—reassess our relationship to our object of study? This seminar approaches these issues through readings of classic texts and recent scholarly interventions that consider, at base level, the relationship between music and the category of the human. We will read widely from critical studies of music and evolution, from feminist theories of (sound) reproduction, from scholarship on music and racial ideology, and from post-humanist writing from animal sounds to AI, among others, to consider the place, and the future, of the “human” in the humanities.

This course introduces fundamental tools for the analysis of tonal music, with a focus on European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our goal is to develop familiarity with the concepts and methods of linear analysis, Formenlehre, rhythm and meter, and semiotics. We will explore tensions and synergies between these approaches and reflect on the type of knowledge that they offer. Note: Music 31100 is conceived as a preparation and foundation for Music 31200, which will build directly upon the analytic models introduced in Music 31100.

As part of three sequential courses, this survey of music history examines European musical culture, and those with which it had contact, from around 800 to 1750. Students will engage scores, source readings, and analysis.

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.

Songs are vehicles of expression that simultaneously employ two modes of communication: language and music. This course will focus on songs in which the linguistic component comes from poems to which music has been added. This practice goes back to antiquity, but it flourished in a remarkable and influential way in German-speaking countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We will explore analytical techniques that consider how words and music combine (and occasionally compete) in songs by composers like Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, moving later in the course to composers like Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Claude Debussy. We will also explore instrumental arrangements of songs done by Franz Liszt and others to consider how music can evoke the spirit of a song in the absence of its words.