MUSI

The University Chamber Orchestra is a 40-member ensemble of strings, woodwinds, and horns that specializes in Baroque, Classical, and 20th-century repertoire for smaller orchestra. The group presents three concerts per year, often pairing a major symphony by Mozart or Haydn with an overture, suite, or concerto for similar forces. The Chamber Orchestra also serves as the pit orchestra for the Music Department's annual collaboration with the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company.

The 100-member University Symphony Orchestra presents an ambitious season of six major concerts per year (two each quarter). Known for its imaginative presentations of unusual repertoire as well as for its powerful performances of major symphonic literature, the University Symphony opens each year with a costumed Halloween concert-a family-friendly event enhanced by storytelling, dancing, and special effects-and closes with a celebratory year-end collaboration with the combined choirs. Repertoire generally encompasses 19th- and 20th-century works written for large orchestral forces, including masterpieces by Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorák, Mahler, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and more. In recent years the USO has presented several silent films with live orchestral accompaniment, including Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, and performed with acclaimed professional soloists every season. USO string sections are coached by the Pacifica Quartet. Membership is chosen on the basis of competitive auditions, and includes both undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff, alumni, and some community members.

The Rockefeller Chapel Choir and its professional subset, the Decani, sing at Sunday services and festivals throughout the academic year and also in Rockefeller's signature Quire & Place concert series, presenting major works from the entire historical canon, lesser-known gems, and the premières of new work by distinguished composers. The choir's members come from diverse spiritual and cultural backgrounds, sharing together the rich musical experience of singing an array of choral music in the unique religious and cultural contexts of a chapel to which students of all world traditions are drawn.

The Women's Ensemble is made up primarily of undergraduate women at the University of Chicago. We explore classical repertoire from the Medieval era up through the present day and music from polyphonic singing traditions across the world, including South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Republic of Georgia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Sweden, and Norway, as well as a variety of American singing traditions. Through diverse repertoire, we strive to bring our voices together in powerful ways.

As the premier undergraduate choral ensemble at the University of Chicago, the Motet Choir accepts 28-36 singers each year. Concentrating on a cappella masterworks of all periods, this polished vocal ensemble specializes in music of the Renaissance and also performs historically and culturally diverse repertoire ranging from Gregorian chant to gospel standards. The Motet Choir presents at least three major concerts per year (one each quarter) and sings at convocations and special events on campus and throughout the Chicago area. The ensemble goes on tour every second year, often during the University's spring break.

The University Chorus is the largest vocal ensemble on campus. Its season includes an annual production of Handel's Messiah as well as presentations of choral masterworks such as Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, and Verdi's Messa da requiem. Among its 80 to 100 members are undergraduates, graduates, faculty and staff members, and singers from the Hyde Park and University community: The result is a wonderfully diverse group of vocalists, collaborating in performances of monuments of the literature. The University Chorus presents three to four concerts per season, culminating in a festive year-end performance with the combined choirs and the University Symphony Orchestra.

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. During the Autumn Quarter of 2020/2021, the DCS will be entirely remote. The DCS provides students an opportunity for a sustained and supportive dissertation-writing workshop for Ph.D. students in Music.

The purpose of this seminar is to assist students (typically in their third year) in crafting a dissertation proposal, gaining critical feedback from their peers, and honing compelling research projects. The meeting schedule of the seminar will be flexible: beginning in the fourth week of Autumn term, we will meet about once every two weeks; it may be, however, that we pick up the tempo a bit during Winter term, such that during Spring term we can slow it down a bit to allow students more time to work with their advisors on the formulation of their research projects. Once I know the schedule of the Department workshops I will schedule the meetings of the DPS to avoid conflicts with classes, workshops and other events, and distribute an initial assignment for reading and discussion.

The subject of improvisation is one that has attained renewed interest and urgency across a spectrum of musical disciplines in recent years: history, theory, ethnomusicology, and composition. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that our understanding of the development and practice of just about every musical tradition has been touched by this Renaissance of scholarship. In this seminar, we will overview some of this scholarship as it impacts some 2,000 years of musical practices and theories. The idea will not be to offer a comprehensive history of improvisation, but rather to dip into selected moments and repertoires in order to see what commonalities we might find. We will see how improvisatory practices were central to a range of canonical repertoires in Western music: from Medieval organum and discant singing to 18th c. instrumental diminutions and partimento pedagogies for the keyboard, Renaissance counterpoint singing, to 19th c. virtuosic piano fantasies and vocal embellishments. We will also consider more contemporary improvisatory practices in jazz and contemporary music, touching on some non-western traditions of improvisation (particularly from the Middle East and South Asia). We will consider varied theoretical problems of aesthetics, the musical canon, and cognitive/psychological aspects of extemporaneous performance. Each class will be divided into both a theoretical/historical part followed by a practicum. Class to include guest faculty performers.

The word archipelago [ἄρχι- -arkhi- ("chief")-and πέλαγος-pélagos ("sea")] was used in medieval Italy to refer to the Aegean Sea, and later referred to the Aegean islands. Currently, it refers to any island group or, in some instances, to a sea containing a large number of scattered islands. By considering archipelagic global spaces such as the Caribbean basin, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Pacific Ocean, "Sounding the Archipelago" is concerned with discursive and material networks of islands, oceans, and continents as they pertain to processes of music-making. Drawing from an interdisciplinary body of scholarship including texts in ethnomusicology, philosophy, geography, island studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature, this seminar examines the theoretical and thematic possibilities of an archipelagic framework of relation. Considering the material and theoretical tension between land and water, and between island and mainland (continental) relations, participants will investigate the types of connections that become visible and audible when island groups are regarded not exclusively as sites of cultural and musical production and circulation, but rather, as models. Specifically, what does it mean to think with a place instead of exclusively about it? How do we think and write about networks, connections, and mobility in ways that foreground in-between spaces and sounds alongside the discourses and epistemologies that constitute them? Where "sounding" refers to measuring the depth of a body of water, to preliminary steps before further action and, of course, to the presence of resonant sound, participants in "Sounding the Archipelago" will critically engage with the archipelagic as a new intellectual field and question its efficacy and suitability to the study of music.