MUSI

This course is a continuation of Music 31100, a study of advanced techniques in tonal analysis. Much of our work will center on Schenkerian theory, but we will also place Schenkerian approaches in dialogue with other methods, including recent approaches to Formenlebre, schema theory, and neo-Riemannian theory. We will be interested in exploring the intersections (and frictions) between these diverse analytical methods, seeking at once to develop analytical fluency in each of them and to heighten our sensitivity to the methodological issues involved in a pluralist approach to tonal analysis.

This is a yearlong course in ear training, keyboard progressions, realization of figured basses at the keyboard, and reading of chamber and orchestral scores. Classes each week consist of one dictation lab (sixty minutes long) and one keyboard lab (thirty minutes long).

Electronic Music I presents an open environment for creativity and expression through composition in the electronic music studio. The course provides students with a background in the fundamentals of sound and acoustics, covers the theory and practice of digital signal processing for audio, and introduces the recording studio as a powerful compositional tool. The course culminates in a concert of original student works presented in multi-channel surround sound. Enrollment gives students access to the Electronic Music Studio in the Department of Music. No prior knowledge of electronic music is necessary.

Designed for beginning composers to practice and hone the nuances of their musical craft, this course introduces some of the fundamentals of music composition through a series of exercises as well as several larger creative projects. Professional musicians will perform students' exercises and compositions. This is primarily a creative, composing course. Through a combination of composition assignments, listening, discussion, analysis, and reading, we will explore and practice the fundamental aspects of music composition. Repertoire study, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, orchestration, timbre, form, transformation, and several other pertinent essentials are included in the curriculum. This laboratory-style, practical course is interactive and discussion-based.

This course focuses on the knowledge necessary to improvise over the chord changes of standard jazz tunes. We cover basic terminology and chord symbols, scale-to-chord relationships, connection devices, and turn-around patterns. For the more experienced improviser, we explore alternate chord changes, tritone substitutions, and ornamentations. Using techniques gained in class, students write their own solos on a jazz tune and transcribe solos from recordings. All instruments are welcome, and students should write to the instructor prior to the first class to let them know their instrument.

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, Bartok, 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."

What can we learn from popular music? Reebee Garofalo asserts that it is "a social and political indicator that mirrors and influences the society we all live in." In his book Audiotopia, musicologist Josh Kun further suggested that "political and cultural citizenship is configured through the performance of popular music and its reception, via acts of listening, by the people." Building upon these observations, Katherine Meizel has argued that popular talent competition shows like American Idol offer a rich and unexplored opportunity to examine such acts of listening, contending that these programs provide valuable lenses into American ideologies and narratives of Americanness. Taking up this charge, this course explores the relationship between American political, educational, social, and cultural discourses, popular culture, and musical performance through analyses of popular music competition shows such as American Idol, America's Got Talent, and The Voice. Organized thematically, the course includes units that address themes of meritocracy, democracy, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, celebrity, disability, talent and ability, and education. The class will examine specific musical performances from televised talent competitions in relation to broader academic literature, popular media coverage, fan discourse, and scholarly sources specifically addressing the talent shows. Students engage in online and in-class debates as well as designing a final project.

Each May since 1956 popular musicians and fans from Europe gather in a European metropolis to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), a competitive spectacle in which musicians from one nation compete against one another. Organized, funded, and broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union, the largest conglomerate of national radio and television networks in the world, the ESC is extensively participatory, creating its own communities of fans, musicians, musical producers, and ordinary citizens, who join together at all levels of society to interact with the politics and historical narratives of Europe. From the moment of heightened Cold War conflict at the birth of ESC to the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the present, ESC has generated public discourse that not only reflects European and global politics, but provides a conduit for local and national citizenries to respond and shape such public discourse about gender and sexuality. The weekly work for the course draws students from across the College into the counterpoint of history and politics with aesthetics and popular culture. Each week will be divided into two parts, the first dedicated to reading and discussion of texts about European history and politics from World War II to the present, the second to interaction with music. Students will experience the ESC through close readings of individual songs and growing familiarity with individual nations with a participatory final project.

Focusing on recent processes of people transitioning and crossing over, in this course, we will study migrating and mobile musics to understand and reconsider music's interrelations with location, space, and transcultural movement. Considering music as a mobile and flexible medium highlights how musical practice shapes post-mobility settings, and inversely, how power structures and cultural processes that govern such environments shape music-making and subjectivities within it. Incited by the recent displacement of individuals and collectives from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya to Europe (specifically to the German-speaking lands), we initially study musical representations such as adapted operas, mixed-ensemble performances, and plays on the streets and the web that emerged because of people's movements. The analysis of these fusions, sound experiments, ensembles and assemblies, co-performances, collaborations, and moments of cultural resistance highlights how music originating in the Arab World interacts with that happening in European sonic locales. Drawing from translational theories, migration studies, and performance studies for the analysis of musical expressions, we then interact with musicians in Chicagoan contexts to study their music-making; music which-as a result of discontinuity, transitional processes, and new contacts-is adapted, altered, and re-contextualized while acquiring new functions and meanings.

This course provides an introduction to ethnomusicology and related disciplines with an emphasis on the methods and contemporary practice of social and cultural analysis. The course reviews a broad selection of writing on non-Western, popular, vernacular, and "world-music" genres from a historical and theoretical perspective, clarifying key analytical terms (i.e., "culture," "subculture," "style," "ritual," "globalization") and methods (i.e., ethnography, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism). In the last part of the course, students learn and develop component skills of fieldwork documentation and ethnographic writing.