MUSI

In “Sounding Israel/Palestine” we shall look at specific moments when the musics and sound worlds of Israel/Palestine converged, responding to and shaping historical change and conflict. Bi-weekly sessions will take specific historical moments as ways of exploring how music was critical to the processes of change, identity, and accommodation. We begin with moments in Antiquity, among them the moments in which the temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (e.g., 70 CE). and the Miʿrāj, when the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven (ca. 621 CE). Moments marking the patterns of settlement (Yishuv) and political transformation and unrest will mark the chronology of modernity and modernism (e.g., 1917, 1933, 1938). The moments of Israeli statehood and Palestinian Nakba will be of growing significance as the course moves toward the twenty-first century (e.g., 1948, 1967, and 1987). The sounds of the present moment (2023 and beyond)—of the war in Gaza, of the struggle for survival in Palestine, of the mass mediation of dissonant political voices, of breakthrough genres of popular music—will become the texts and contexts for the closing weeks of the course.

The Blues set the template for American popular music in the twentieth century. But its influence was felt across all corners of the arts, and beyond. In this class, we will explore the musical history of the Blues, from its roots in the US South, through the Chicago of the Great Migration, to its explosion across the globe. But we will do so in tandem with considering its tremendous cultural reach: in literature, philosophy, art, and film. We will examine how poets like Langston Hughes found in the Blues a new poetic language; how philosophers and political thinkers like Amiri Baraka, Albert Murray, and Angela Davis found a powerful social analytic; how artists like Archibald Motely and Romare Bearden spun music into a new visual language; and how filmmakers—most recently Ryan Coogler—turned to the mythology of the Blues to reanimate the Southern Gothic in Hollywood. Across these domains and more, we will consider how the Blues—as sound and idea—became a cypher for notions of race, class, and respectability in twentieth-century culture, and how these notions continue to play out in the present day.

This course is a continuation of MUSI 261: Introduction to Composition, and an opportunity to go deeper into creative work. The focus will be on writing new pieces while also learning about various techniques and aesthetics, with special attention on music of the last hundred years. The new works will be performed and recorded by professional musicians, with demonstrations of instruments as well. Students are encouraged to bring their own existing interests into discussions and projects, while also incorporating newly acquired ideas and inspirations. There will also be focused attention on analysis of more recent repertoire for a variety of instrumentations and configurations, addressing new ways of thinking about harmony, melody, form, timbre, orchestration, rhythm, improvisation, notation, technology, theatricality, and concept. Students will also attend rehearsals and performances of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition and other events on campus.

This course introduces theoretical and analytical approaches to twentieth-century music. The core of the course involves learning a new theoretical apparatus—often called "set theory"—and exploring how best to apply that apparatus analytically to pieces by composers such as Schoenberg, Bartók, and Stravinsky. We also explore the relevance of the theoretical models to music outside of the high-modernist canon, including some jazz. The course provides an opportunity to confront some foundational questions regarding what it means to "theorize about music."

For decades, popular music has been the soundtrack to many Americans’ lives. This class explores the structure, function, and impact of a range of vernacular musics from the 20th and 21st centuries. Our approach to popular music will be by turns historical, analytical, and sociological. Students will learn about formal designs of pop songs, from verse-chorus to much more elaborate structures, along with antecedents in the Great American Songbook tradition. Students will learn to analyze the harmonic and melodic conventions in various genres, and also spend significant time with groove analysis and design. Finally, the class will interrogate the sociological relevance of vernacular musics, weaving in discussions of relevant social issues from radio play to popularity, and from subcultural appeal to racial identity. This class is open to anyone who listens carefully and with passion, and who wants to grow their ability to write about music. Experience as a practitioner of any type of music and/or a passing knowledge of music theory will be helpful, but it is not necessary to read notated music for this course.

The course explores the role of music during periods of crisis in global contexts. We will study how communities and societies use music and sound to express, make sense of, and even generate regimes of fear, torture, and loss. At a time when the human and more-than-human spheres coalesce, new technologies redefine human experience, and political and natural catastrophes shape lived reality, sound becomes a powerful way of practising resilience. The course engages interdisciplinary methods to understand issues of musical activism, music therapy, and music as a powerful means to come to terms with conflict, war, and personal trauma. Be it the Second World War where music served to further Nazi propaganda, anthropogenic sound that results in stress, habitat alteration for land and marine animals, dealing with the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, the "music-before-mosque" riots in South Asia where processions near religious spaces fuelled communal violence, or stories in indigenous cultures that music could mitigate natural calamity, music is a rich site of understanding how communities deal with moments of crisis. Disciplines such as psychoanalysis, cultural studies, sound studies, media studies, and environmental humanities will be explored with a focus on close analysis of music in global contexts. Assignments feature creative projects (podcasts, annotated playlists, video essays, creative compositions, etc.) and academic papers. No prior musical background required.

Audre Lorde famously suggested that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And yet for as long as human societies have been organized by structural oppression, disenfranchised peoples have managed to exercise subversive forms of agency by reinterpreting the societal structures and cultural resources they have inherited from their oppressors, retooling these structures to serve their own marginalized communities’ needs. This syllabus foregrounds the works of LGBTQ and BIPOC scholars and artists to discuss the various ways agency is exercised from below in the seemingly intractable context of heteropatriarchal white supremacist settler colonialism. As many of these writers and performers demonstrate, such agency often involves working directly with “the master’s tools” while strategically subverting these same resources in service of minoritarian goals. Throughout the quarter, we will use music and performance as our lens to interrogate these subversive forms of resistance and the performative power of artistic expression.

This course introduces autoethnography as a practice of linking personal narrative to meaningful cultural critique. Students will experiment with performance, writing, and multimedia practices to test how storytelling and embodied practice can function as research tools. Throughout the course, we will consider how creative methods can inform research design, how to evaluate the quality and utility of autoethnographic research, and what role sharing and community play in the effectiveness of qualitative research.

The composition seminar is a weekly session designed for undergraduate students in composition lessons. 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.