2019-2020

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.

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).

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

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 one-quarter elective course covers the basic elements of music theory, including music reading, intervals, chords, meter, and rhythm.