Theory

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.

Johann Sebastian Bach is somewhat of a cipher, one whose image and meaning has changed remarkably over the centuries. In this class, we will look at many of these shifting images of the famous Leipzig composer. Was he the pious Thomaskantor dutifully churning out his cantatas and passions or the intellectual wizard of an abstract and dying fugal art? A belated hero of German nationalism, or a universal icon of musical humanity celebrated by many as the greatest composer of all time? We will do a fair amount of readings that reflect many of these changing views of Bach. But we will also spend much of our time listening to—and studying—his music, seeing what clues he has offered to help us understand this most enigmatic of composers. While an advanced understanding of music theory is not a prerequisite for this course, it will be important that you can read music and helpful to have a foundational understanding of harmony and counterpoint.

Black artists are often written out of the history of musical experimentalism. John Cage’s place in the canon is secure, but what of Cecil Taylor’s? Or Anthony Braxton’s? Or Matana Roberts’s? Labels like “jazz” or “free jazz” segregate these artists from white experimentalists, suggesting that their music is best understood within a narrowly racialized genre category, rather than as part of the experimental mainstream, with its assumed whiteness, institutional support, and inbuilt prestige. This course redresses this imbalance by centering the music of Black radical composers in the latter half of the twentieth century. We will study the music of a wide range of composers, including many associated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), one of the most venerable musical collectives of the twentieth century, rooted right here in Chicago’s South Side. The course will tack between studies of the music’s sounds and its historical, political, and ideological contexts. We will develop critical and analytical language for engaging the often-bracing sound worlds of those composers while building out a contextual understanding of their work as at once capaciously experimental and situated in a political context of resistance.

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."

The third quarter undertakes the study of modulation, sequences, and additional analysis of classical forms. Musicianship labs in ear training and keyboard skills required.

This course aims to develop students' analytical and critical tools by focusing on a select group of works drawn from the Western European and American concert tradition. The texts for the course are recordings. Through listening, written assignments, and class discussion, we explore topics such as compositional strategy, conditions of musical performance, interactions between music and text, and the relationship between music and ideology as they are manifested in complete compositions.

This course aims to develop students' analytical and critical tools by focusing on a select group of works drawn from the Western European and American concert tradition. The texts for the course are recordings. Through listening, written assignments, and class discussion, we explore topics such as compositional strategy, conditions of musical performance, interactions between music and text, and the relationship between music and ideology as they are manifested in complete compositions.

Without a doubt, memory is crucial to the production and understanding of musical sound. At the small scale, much of musical discourse relies on being able to remember what was just heard so that we can compare and relate it to what we are now hearing. On the large scale, memories for musical materials can persist over a lifetime and—as research with Alzheimer’s patients has shown—may remain when other memories have vanished. Memory is equally a tool for composers and improvisers: consider the striking recollections of earlier songs in Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und Leben, or Jim Hall’s references to “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” in his 1975 solo over “The Way You Look Tonight.” Memory is equally basic to evocations or enactments of nostalgia through sound, as in the Magic Numbers’s “Roy Orbison” (from the album Alias). Indeed, an argument can be made that musical practice writ large is how societies remember—that is music, especially as it is linked with embodied practice, is a technology for memory.

Readings include research on memory processes (such as Frederick Bartlett’s Remembering, David Rubin’s Memory in Oral Cultures, and Gabriel Radvansky and Jeffrey Zack’s Event Cognition), approaches from social anthropology (like Paul Connerton’s How Societies Remember), and readings from music scholars engaged with the topic of memory (for example, Charles Rosen’s observations about Dichterliebe in The Romantic Generation).

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.