History

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.

Over the course of the last 120 years, opera and cinema have been sounded and seen together again and again. Where opera is commonly associated with extravagant performance and production, cinema is popularly associated with realism. Yet their encounter not only proves these assumptions wrong but produces some extraordinary third kinds--media hybrids. It also produces some extraordinary love affairs. Thomas Edison wanted a film of his to be “a grand opera,” and Federico Fellini and Woody Allen wanted opera to saturate their films. Thinking about these mutual attractions, “Opera across Media” explores different operatic and cinematic repertories as well as other media forms. Among films to be studied are Pabst’s Threepenny Opera (1931), Visconti’s Senso (1954), Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Zeffirelli’s La traviata (1981), DeMille’s Carmen (1915), Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), Bergman’s The Magic Flute (1975), and Fellini’s E la nave va (1983). No prior background in music performance, theory, or notation is needed. Students may write papers based on their own skills and interests relevant to the course. Required work includes attendance at all screenings and classes; weekly postings on Canvas about readings and viewings; attendances at a Met HD broadcast and a Lyric Opera live opera; a short “think piece” midway through the course; and a final term paper of 8-10 pages.

Songs are getting shorter. Hyperpop has reached the mainstream. And Taylor Swift has released thirty-four different versions of her latest album. What do these things all have in common? This course will propose that the answer is music streaming, which over the last two decades has radically reshaped the way artists write, record, and release music. We will explore streaming’s impact on the popular music soundscape by reading recent scholarship on the economics and politics of streaming, digging into the curation practices of platforms like Spotify, and listening closely to streaming-era genres like hyperpop and Soundcloud rap. Along the way, we will consider big questions about musical creativity and standardization, democratization and homogenization, and privacy and surveillance. Students need not read music notation or know music theory; they should come prepared to read challenging theoretical texts and listen attentively to a lot of music. Assessments will include essays, research projects, and self-produced podcast episodes.

This one-quarter course is designed to enrich the listening experience of students, particularly with respect to the art music of the Western European and American concert tradition. Students are introduced to the basic elements of music and the ways that they are integrated to create works in various styles. Particular emphasis is placed on musical form and on the potential for music to refer to and interact with aspects of the world outside.

This one-quarter course is designed to enrich the listening experience of students, particularly with respect to the art music of the Western European and American concert tradition. Students are introduced to the basic elements of music and the ways that they are integrated to create works in various styles. Particular emphasis is placed on musical form and on the potential for music to refer to and interact with aspects of the world outside.

This seminar will explore contemporary debates on how music has been thought to define, divide, precede, and exceed, the category of the human. In an epoch theorized at once as a universalizing “Anthropocene,” and at other times as the socially stratifying “Capitalocene”; and in an intellectual moment in which notions of uniquely human creative capacities are questioned both by a growing literature in animal studies, and by an insistence that large language models are capable of equivalent (or analogous) creative production, must we—“humanists” in the academy—reassess our relationship to our object of study? This seminar approaches these issues through readings of classic texts and recent scholarly interventions that consider, at base level, the relationship between music and the category of the human. We will read widely from critical studies of music and evolution, from feminist theories of (sound) reproduction, from scholarship on music and racial ideology, and from post-humanist writing from animal sounds to AI, among others, to consider the place, and the future, of the “human” in the humanities.

This course introduces fundamental tools for the analysis of tonal music, with a focus on European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our goal is to develop familiarity with the concepts and methods of linear analysis, Formenlehre, rhythm and meter, and semiotics. We will explore tensions and synergies between these approaches and reflect on the type of knowledge that they offer. Note: Music 31100 is conceived as a preparation and foundation for Music 31200, which will build directly upon the analytic models introduced in Music 31100.

As part of three sequential courses, this survey of music history examines European musical culture, and those with which it had contact, from around 800 to 1750. Students will engage scores, source readings, and analysis.

This one-quarter course is designed to enrich the listening experience of students, particularly with respect to the art music of the Western European and American concert tradition. Students are introduced to the basic elements of music and the ways that they are integrated to create works in various styles. Particular emphasis is placed on musical form and on the potential for music to refer to and interact with aspects of the world outside.

This one-quarter course is designed to enrich the listening experience of students, particularly with respect to the art music of the Western European and American concert tradition. Students are introduced to the basic elements of music and the ways that they are integrated to create works in various styles. Particular emphasis is placed on musical form and on the potential for music to refer to and interact with aspects of the world outside.