2020-2021

The purpose of this seminar is to assist students (typically in their third year) in crafting a dissertation proposal, gaining critical feedback from their peers, and honing compelling research projects. The meeting schedule of the seminar will be flexible: beginning in the fourth week of Autumn term, we will meet about once every two weeks; it may be, however, that we pick up the tempo a bit during Winter term, such that during Spring term we can slow it down a bit to allow students more time to work with their advisors on the formulation of their research projects. Once I know the schedule of the Department workshops I will schedule the meetings of the DPS to avoid conflicts with classes, workshops and other events, and distribute an initial assignment for reading and discussion.

The current indeterminacy of music studies—stemming from its overdue reckoning with the legacies of white supremacy and colonialism—has left scholars with the imperative and the opportunity to rethink the foundations of the field. Amidst this state of things, the seminar will set aside the familiar method of applying philosophical authorities to scholarship on music. Instead, we will investigate music-philosophy as its own praxis: as varied modes of action, of making, and of rethinking what music is, what it does, its pasts, futures, and its mind-bending significance. Through a varied set of course readings, we will discuss salient philosophical issues currently circulating in the field (affect, history, political economy, ineffability, technology, and social difference) and study the work of a few postwar avant-garde musicians who themselves worked with philosophical aspirations.

We explore a global range of genres that combine music and the intimate stage through the theoretical formulation of the cabaretesque. The performance practices we examine combine music and theater in ways that are historically and culturally diverse, ranging from medieval and early modern European genres such as mystery plays or Purimspiele to commedia dell’arte and operetta to modern musicals and cabaret itself. We also search for similar forms of intimate musical theater in cross-cultural Asian performance, such as Persian siah-bazi, South Indian kathakali, Korean p’ansori, and Japanese chindon-ya. The genres of music on the intimate stage that underlie the history of cinema (e.g., the first synchronized sound films, The Jazz Singer and Der blaue Engel) will be a consistent focus throughout the seminar. To understand the cabaretesque in opera performance we shall look especially closely at the transformation of Berlin’s Komische Oper in the twenty-first-century, applying close readings to several recent productions. Together, we seek to develop the theory of cabaretesque as an approach to understanding complex social and political relations across the fault lines between self and other. Taking Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque as a point of departure, we shall read widely in modern writing on the cabaret as a performance practice that turns the world on its head and history inside-out.

This course explores topics in the history of music theory from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries (with excursions into the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries as necessary). We will focus on a range of topics, including: scientific empiricism and music theory, musical rhetoric, the transition from modal to tonal thinking, the partimento tradition, harmonic theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theories of modulation and tonality, theories of form, theories of musical rhythm, hermeneutic and semiotic approaches to musical analysis. Although secondary literature on these topics will be an important part of the assigned readings, our focus will be on primary sources. Not all of these have been translated, and so a reading knowledge of French and German will be useful. (Of course, secondary sources may be in either of these languages as well.) In additional to doing the readings and participating in class discussion, students will make a short presentation on conceptual material relevant to the course and complete two brief analysis assignments. There will be a final exam similar in design to the theory essay exams given during comprehensives.

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.

What does it mean to be “Armenian”? Despite centuries of dispersion and displacement, there has remained, in the Armenian diaspora, a sense of Armenian-ness—a sense, in other words, of being Armenian. This course will serve as an interrogation of and meditation on what that sense of being has looked like across time and space, as seen through the lens of pivotal musical and other artistic works from the post-genocide diaspora. Through in-depth analyses of these works and the discourses surrounding them, this course will trace the emergence, articulation, and negotiation of Armenian diasporic subjectivities and the ways in which those subjectivities have emerged in relation to and in conversation with power structures both internal and external to the Armenian communities under discussion. Diaspora, then, will be approached not as a fixed unit of analysis, but as something that emerges and is sustained through complex relationships and negotiations with sociopolitical forces both within and outside the diasporic community. Through this course, we will see that artistic expression in the Armenian diaspora functions as a site of agency: a site in which the question of what it is to be Armenian is explored in ways that shape, challenge, and upend notions and understandings of diasporic identity.

The seminar guides students through the preliminary stages of selecting and refining a topic, and provides an interactive forum for presenting and discussing the early stages of research, conceptualization, and writing. The course culminates in the presentation of a paper that serves as the foundation of the honors thesis. The instructors work closely with honors project supervisors, who may be drawn from the entire music faculty.

Why has lip syncing caused so many scandals and successes across media, from Milli Vanilli to drag? Primarily focusing on American film, TV, music videos, and animation, this course investigates how sound synchronization creates alternate identities and realities. We may think we know lip sync and voice synthesis when we see and hear them, but close reading unveils deeper issues of technological construction and gendered performances. For example, Singin’ in the Rain dramatizes film’s transition to sound as technicians struggled to match the “right” voice to the “right” body: a beautiful woman with an ugly voice lip syncs to the lovely voice of a woman who Hollywood deems unsuitable to appear onscreen. From The Jazz Singer to today’s alarmingly authentic deepfakes and vocaloids, we will diagnose how vocal appropriation and synthesis conjure states of credibility and belief. We will ask how lip sync authenticates talking animals and faux rockers. Questions of star power and authorship confronting performances of gender and sexuality. No matter the motive, vocal manipulation can never be taken at face value, especially in an age when contortions between sounds and their sources can be passed off as truth.

MUSI 27300 treats music since 1800. Topics include the music of Beethoven and his influence on later composers; the rise of public concerts, German opera, programmatic instrumental music, and nationalist trends; the confrontation with modernism; and the impact of technology on the expansion of musical boundaries.

Electronic Music II is an introduction to computer-based sound art and live electronic music performance. Our primary tool for this course will be SuperCollider, a computer music programming language designed for composition and real-time music applications. Through this language we will explore the foundations of computer music, including digital instrument design, sequencing, live processing, sound diffusion, and various approaches to algorithmic music generation.