Spring

This seminar provides graduate students with an introduction to the economics of music, focusing on historical developments since the advent of mechanical reproduction and radio broadcasting around 1900. Key topics include the labor of music-making, the evolving relationship between musical production and technology, and the commodification of music—published, performed, recorded, licensed, and streamed. We will examine the growth of the global music industry and critically engage with issues such as remuneration, exchange, and assetization. These discussions will be framed within broader debates on late capitalism, addressing themes like income inequality, tax policy, vocational versus avocational labor, intersectionality and the social movements of the New Left, productive versus reproductive labor, and the potential decline of neoliberalism amidst shifting geopolitical dynamics. A central question will be whether music—given its metaphysical and intensely affective qualities—harbors a unique or distinctive status within larger economies of aesthetic, cultural, and material production. Readings will draw from a wide range of disciplines, including music studies, history, anthropology, law, economics, media studies, philosophy, and critical theory.

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.

TBD

The topic of this seminar varies per faculty member. This proseminar is designed to equip graduate students with methodological and epistemological tools for doing ethnographic fieldwork in expressive cultural contexts.

The history of the American musical in the 20th century is paradoxical. While the genre is often denigrated as staging lyrical utopias of romance and adventure allowing audiences to escape depressing quotidian realities, many musicals did seek to engage some of the most pressing social issues of their day. In this course, we will look—and listen—closely to four differing canonical musicals from the past 100 years, studying their creative origins, while also analyzing their complex social meanings revealed through the story, music, lyrics, staging, and dance.

This proseminar analyzes rock music's complex, evolving legacy in global culture and the study of popular music and genre. For better or worse, we still think and hear popular music through rock. Tangled up in the political upheavals of and around 1968, rock music continues to shape how musicians and scholars imagine political agency and how music might make a difference. Later musicians have sought to recapture rock's alleged disruptive potential in ever-new paradigms: prog rock, punk, metal, and many more. Scholars, too, looked to rock music when they began to study subcultures and supposedly counter-hegemonic cultural production. As the semi-mythical archetype of "popular music that doesn't care about being popular," rock helped establish the study of recorded popular music and genre. We will scrutinize rock music’s ambivalent legacy in forming new musical, political, and scholarly discourses with readings, research projects, presentations, and discussions. Since we will try to understand the whole of popular music through rock, this course will benefit greatly from participants with diverse musical backgrounds and skill sets. 

Hand-built circuits, tape loops, feedback, filters, ring modulators, turntables, live-processing software environments, microphones, and human-machine interface designs. In this course, we will study current and historical approaches to the performative use of hardware and software environments in music, and will follow the practice as it continues to redefine music composition and improvisation in the 21st century. Study will be repertoire-based, drawing from the work of artists ranging from David Tudor to Herbie Hancock to Grandmaster Flash to Kaija Saariaho.