Winter

This introductory course in music is intended for students who are interested in exploring the language, interpretation, and meaning of music through coordinated listening, analysis, and creative work. By listening to and comprehending the structural and aesthetic considerations behind significant written and improvised works, from the earliest examples of notated Western music to the music of living composers and performers, students will be prepared to undertake analytical and ultimately creative projects. The relationship between cultural and historical practices and the creation and reception of music will also be considered. The course is taught by a practicing composer, whose experience will guide and inform the works studied. No prior background in music is required.

This introductory course in music is intended for students who are interested in exploring the language, interpretation, and meaning of music through coordinated listening, analysis, and creative work. By listening to and comprehending the structural and aesthetic considerations behind significant written and improvised works, from the earliest examples of notated Western music to the music of living composers and performers, students will be prepared to undertake analytical and ultimately creative projects. The relationship between cultural and historical practices and the creation and reception of music will also be considered. The course is taught by a practicing composer, whose experience will guide and inform the works studied. No prior background in music is required.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This one-quarter course is designed to enrich the listening experience of students, particularly with respect to the art music of the Western European and American concert tradition. Students are introduced to the basic elements of music and the ways that they are integrated to create works in various styles. Particular emphasis is placed on musical form and on the potential for music to refer to and interact with aspects of the world outside.

This course explores current understandings of the medieval motet, in the wake of a flurry of recent scholarly interventions in monographs by David Rothenberg (2011), Emma Dillon (2012), Jennifer Saltzstein (2013), Anna Zayaruznaya (2015 and 2018), Catherine A. Bradley (2018), and Karen Desmond (2018). The new genre of the motet emerged in early thirteenth-century Paris in the cultural circles surrounding Notre Dame Cathedral and the burgeoning Parisian University. It represented a radically new form of polyphonic composition that frequently combined sacred and secular elements and traditions to sometimes shocking and ironic effect. Beginning with largely anonymous motet creations in the thirteenth century, which often borrowed and/or re-texted pre-existing materials, the course concludes with the carefully-curated 'complete works' collections overseen by Guillaume de Machaut in the mid fourteenth century. Through readings that span a diverse range of scholarly approaches-from sound studies to the study of musical monsters-we will investigate motets ca. 1200-1350 from various angles, engaging with questions of cultural contexts, audiences, and manuscript production; musical chronologies, quotations, and notations; the sonic impact of polytextuality; intertextuality and textual hermeneutics; authorship and authoriality.

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.

This course has two goals: (1) to introduce graduate students to the broad theoretical underpinnings of ethnomusicology as a research discipline and (2) to help students gain facility with the resources and perspectives that might enable them to teach a quarter- or semester-long undergraduate course on the musics of the world. As such, the readings and assignments focus on canonic materials and areas for ethnomusicological study including, but not limited to, major monographs, recorded collections and reference works examining the musics of East, Southeast and South Asia; Africa; Europe; and the Americas. Each student will be responsible for presenting brief overviews of key texts and recordings as well as devising two syllabi and a sample lecture outline by the end of the quarter.

In this proseminar in analysis we examine the concepts and structures of mode that stretch from South Asia across the Middle East to the Mediterranean. We concentrate our comparative study on Arabic maq_m, Turkish makam, Persian radif, North Indian/Hindustani r_ga, and South Indian/Karnatak r_gam. Historically, processes and patterns of exchange between classical, popular, and folk musics in these regions have shaped repertories, ideas of melody and form, vocal practice and instrumental accompaniment, improvisation and composition, bearing witness to similarities and cross-influences, no less than to distinctive local and regional music cultures. To know and understand the music cultures of the Middle East and South Asia, as well as Muslim regions of Central and East Asia, it is indispensable also to understand the practices of improvisation and composition we analyze in this proseminar.

This proseminar approaches nineteenth-century European music from an evolving perspective that gained momentum during the 1990s, when American musicology became more interested in the historical context. Amid this new orientation and the exploration of new areas of research, many methods and topics have remained remarkably stable. There have been only few attempts to conceive music history and historiography in a way that reflects these new perspectives and the new themes in a more comprehensive framework. This proseminar will try to make some steps in the direction of rethinking our approach to the history and historiography of music-this time with a focus on the 19th century. We will touch on a number of important topics, but no attempt can be made to be comprehensive with respect to both repertory and scholarly literature.