Graduate

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.

Subsequent to the publication of Robert Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style in 2007 there was renewed interest in musical schemas and a steady growth of schema theory. Expanding considerably beyond the musical practice of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (which were Gjerdingen’s focus), it now
seems that there is a schema for every time and occasion.

The seminar aims to take a step back from this proliferation of music-theoretical structures to consider how the notion of a schema developed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, starting with Sir Henry Head’s use of the term in his 1920 Studies in Neurology. This consideration will show both
the promise and the limitations of schema theory as it is presently employed in close readings of musical works. Seminar readings will draw broadly from work in psychology, computational theory, cognitive science, and music theory.

The seminar will conclude with a mini-conference during tenth week, during which each participant will have twenty minutes to present a summary of their findings, followed by ten minutes of discussion. Seminar papers (which are typically around 15–20 pages in length) must be turned in no later than August 21, 2026 or no grade for the seminar will be given.

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.

This co-taught, in-person seminar will take up the philosophical, social, and political problem of how love relates to music as both experience and idea with a focus on Greece and the wider Mediterranean. Whether staged and performed, publicly shared, or privately consumed, love and music pervade time and place, shaping diverse genres, engaging different media, and articulating numerous domains of human life and the public sphere. Yet the mediation of love experiences through music remains radically undertheorized. The seminar “Love/ Music” will think about what the love/ music nexus demands as an object of ethnographic and historical study and as a theoretical entity. The course has a binary scope, being both theoretical and hands-on ethnographic (including historical ethnography). Thus its syllabus includes sessions addressing seminal theoretical readings alongside sessions structured as “ethnographic workshops” variously addressing the problematic of the “love / music relation.

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).

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.

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."