2019-2020

The composition seminar is a weekly session designed for graduate students in composition. It is an open forum for composers to listen to recent music, including their own, and to discuss issues connected with trends, esthetics, and compositional techniques. The entire composition faculty takes part in these sessions. The composition seminar often hosts well-known visiting composers whose works are performed in the city by various groups or ensembles, as well as performers specializing in new music and contemporary techniques.

This course has two goals: (1) to introduce graduate students to the broad theoretical underpinnings of ethnomusicology as a research discipline and (2) to help students gain facility with the resources and perspectives that might enable them to teach a quarter- or semester-long undergraduate course on the musics of the world. As such, the readings and assignments focus on canonic materials and areas for ethnomusicological study including, but not limited to, major monographs, recorded collections and reference works examining the musics of East, Southeast and South Asia; Africa; Europe; and the Americas. Each student will be responsible for presenting brief overviews of key texts and recordings as well as devising two syllabi and a sample lecture outline by the end of the quarter.

In this proseminar in analysis we examine the concepts and structures of mode that stretch from South Asia across the Middle East to the Mediterranean. We concentrate our comparative study on Arabic maq_m, Turkish makam, Persian radif, North Indian/Hindustani r_ga, and South Indian/Karnatak r_gam. Historically, processes and patterns of exchange between classical, popular, and folk musics in these regions have shaped repertories, ideas of melody and form, vocal practice and instrumental accompaniment, improvisation and composition, bearing witness to similarities and cross-influences, no less than to distinctive local and regional music cultures. To know and understand the music cultures of the Middle East and South Asia, as well as Muslim regions of Central and East Asia, it is indispensable also to understand the practices of improvisation and composition we analyze in this proseminar.

This proseminar approaches nineteenth-century European music from an evolving perspective that gained momentum during the 1990s, when American musicology became more interested in the historical context. Amid this new orientation and the exploration of new areas of research, many methods and topics have remained remarkably stable. There have been only few attempts to conceive music history and historiography in a way that reflects these new perspectives and the new themes in a more comprehensive framework. This proseminar will try to make some steps in the direction of rethinking our approach to the history and historiography of music-this time with a focus on the 19th century. We will touch on a number of important topics, but no attempt can be made to be comprehensive with respect to both repertory and scholarly literature.

This course introduces fundamental tools of tonal analysis, applied to music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, accomplished through a focus on Heinrich Schenker's influential theory of linear analysis. A portion of the course will be given over to exploring the historical and cultural context of Schenker's theory, its critical reception, and the ways it has been applied. This will be complemented by an introduction to Schenkerian techniques and the analytical resources they offer. Note: Music 31100 is conceived as a preparation and foundation for Music 31200, which will build directly upon the analytic models and repertoire introduced in Music 31100.

Improvisation: when we hear this term, we think of real-time performance. We think of skill, inspiration, passion. With a little more reflection, we think of the hours of preparation that lie behind every action of the improviser, the licks, tropes, and patterns. If improvisation is determined by a larger aesthetic system, how is it any different from other species of performative actions? Is improvisation only improvisation by virtue of not (yet) being on paper? The term can become so broad that it becomes unwieldy. We can name very few intrinsic characteristics of improvisation, but we know it when we see it - in other words, it is controlled by the vast network of social and cultural signs present in its performance context.
Improvisation is a Western term that has been associated in the 20th century with Black musical forms. Because of this, the term improvisation undergoes a process of racialization - representing the body as opposed to the mind, the irrational as opposed to the supposed rationality of composition. We can now easily see the presence of improvisation in other performance cultures, including European art-music. Keeping this in mind, all attempts to theorize the improvisatory should nevertheless be sensitive to its history. Can musical improvisation give us a model for newer, more egalitarian social structures? Or does the very word improvisation represent a modernist myopia, a failure to see the organizational structures that ungird musical activity?

This is a yearlong course in ear training, keyboard progressions, realization of figured basses at the keyboard, and reading of chamber and orchestral scores. Classes each week consist of one dictation lab (sixty minutes long) and one keyboard lab (thirty minutes long).

In 16th century counterpoint students will write traditional species counterpoint as studied by composers for centuries, but with an ear bent towards the actual style of Palestrina and other Renaissance masters. In addition to critiquing their own exercises, students will analyze Renaissance counterpoint through listening, score-study, and fill-in-the-voice puzzles. Not only will students be able to recognize and discuss the effects of traditional counterpoint on composers from Victoria to Stravinsky, they will also discuss the elusive question of what makes good counterpoint… good, regardless of style. 

Electronic Music I presents an open environment for creativity and expression through composition in the electronic music studio. The course provides students with a background in the fundamentals of sound and acoustics, covers the theory and practice of digital signal processing for audio, and introduces the recording studio as a powerful compositional tool. The course culminates in a concert of original student works presented in multi-channel surround sound. Enrollment gives students access to the Electronic Music Studio in the Department of Music. No prior knowledge of electronic music is necessary.

Disability is often an afterthought, an unexpected tragedy to be mitigated, accommodated, or overcome. In cultural, political, and educational spheres, disabilities are non-normative, marginal, even invisible. This runs counter to many of our lived experiences of difference where, in fact, disabilities of all kinds are the "new normal." In this interdisciplinary course, we center both the category and experience of disability. Moreover, we consider the stakes of explicitly designing for different kinds of bodies and minds. Rather than approaching disability as a problem to be accommodated, we consider the affordances that disability offers for design. This course begins by situating us in the growing discipline of Disability Studies and the activist (and intersectional) Disability Justice movement. We then move to four two-week units in specific areas where disability meets design: architecture, infrastructure, and public space; education and the classroom; economics, employment, and public policy; and aesthetics. Traversing from architecture to art, and from education to economic policy, this course asks how we can design for access.