MUSI

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 course explores some of the music traditions that hail from South Asia—a region defined by the countries of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Maldives, and their diasporas. The course will study music and some of its inextricably linked forms of dance and theatre through the lens of ethnomusicology, where music is considered in its social and cultural contexts. Students will develop tools to listen, analyze, watch, and participate in South Asian forms of music-making, using case-study based inquiries as guides along the way.

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.

This two-quarter course will provide a conceptual and practical introduction to the art, the craft, and the practice of orchestral conducting. The course is targeted primarily toward graduate students in Music Composition, but is open to advanced undergraduate or graduate students with orchestral or choral performance experience as well. Interested students should have had some experience playing or singing in a performance ensemble, as well as a basic familiarity with orchestral instruments and with the standard orchestral repertoire.

During the winter quarter, class sessions, readings, and repertoire assignments will provide the practical and philosophical basis for subsequent work in the course. Important technical exercises will be assigned every week, as well as several short papers and worksheets over the course of the quarter. The overall workload of the course is commensurate with a one-half course load per quarter. Because of the workshop nature of the course, class attendance and class participation are of prime importance. Students will receive one course credit upon successful completion of the two-quarter sequence (Winter and Spring 2026).

This proseminar will engage contemporary musicology’s revivification of the elusive concept “modernity,” engaging some grounding theories of the modern alongside new and imaginative work in music and sound studies, much of it reframing what modernity was and, through narrative and archival revision, might still be. Familiarity with western music history, musical repertoire, and music notation may in some cases help but is not a prerequisite.

MUSI 31200 is the second of a two-quarter sequence developing your skills to practically and critically engage with analysis in a variety of tonal musics. We will focus on chromatic harmony, modulation, and neo-Riemannian terminology; on metric theory; and on issues of corpus, form, and harmony in popular music studies. Our analytical work will be framed within an ongoing disciplinary conversation about what tonal analysis has been and can be in the field of music theory and beyond.