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.
Listening to trans*, raced, and castrato voices, "Errant Voices: Gender and Performances beyond Measure" will explore voices that escape their confines perforce or by choice, trying to make sense of resistant, insurgent, and resilient voices. Students from various disciplines are invited to join the seminar, thereby helping to advance its themes but working from their own strengths and orientations. Our common goal will be to develop shared theoretical language among differing cases that can lead to new insights into wider paradigmatic shifts across gender and race in our historical moment. The project turns on performances inasmuch as they reveal the workings of bodies, intentions, and interactions. It depends on collective thinking because it is intersectional and thus concerns emergent shared languages developed by encountering questions collaboratively.
This course looks at themes and moments of music in Europe and the European abroad, with some comparisons of other musical traditions. Students will engage source readings, notation/improvisation, and cultural contexts, along with trans-continental links and disjunctures. Requirements include: dealing with sources, one class report, a mock single-sheet exam, and a take-home final. It is possible that we might interact with the Haymarket Opera Company's production of Monteverdi's *Poppea* in June.
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.
Queer practice and identity have long been expressed through/as song. According to Ovid, it was the great singer Orpheus who first introduced same-sex relationships to the people of Thrace; in early modern Europe, men performing the role of Orpheus on the operatic stage were often eunuchs with non-normative bodies singing in a vocal range traditionally associated with the feminine. Beyond fabled musicians, though, carnal technologies of the voice have continually been implicated in historically and geographically situated paradigms of queerness. Likewise, many of the spaces in which queer peoples have found community or refuge have been associated with music or singing. What might it suggest that in the twentieth century, generations of queer communities formed around listening to and ventriloquizing the voices of Judy Garland, Maria Callas, and Madonna? How might exclusively queer spaces, like the hijra communities of the Indian subcontinent, effect the production of voice and performance of music for its inhabitants and outside observers? For which audiences are young trans* people on YouTube documenting their vocal progressions over the course of their transitions? Why have both European and Chinese operatic traditions abounded with cross-dressing for most of their histories? In this course we will investigate the broad relationship between practices of the voice and the body and consider why so many of our cultural understandings of queerness are accompanied by singing.
This course shifts our critical attention from watching movies to listening to them. Amid a strong emphasis on cinema--ranging from musical accompaniment during the silent era to sound in experimental films, or from classical Hollywood underscoring to Bollywood musical numbers--we will consider the soundtrack of moving pictures within a growing variety of audiovisual media, including television, music videos, and computer games. Interactive lectures (Mondays and Wednesdays) and discussion sections (Fridays) combine a historical overview with transhistorical perspectives. Supplemented by screenings and readings, the course will address a variety issues and topics: aesthetic and psychological (such as representation, narration, affect); cultural and political (such as race, ethnicity, propaganda); social and economic (such as technology, production, dissemination).
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 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.
