| Monday |
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MHS 590
MUELLER D
M
10:35 - 12:25
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Music and Digital Culture: Digital technologies have enabled unprecedented access to musical cultures. Far-flung performances on YouTube are simply a click away. Esoteric facts are instantaneously accessible. Entire histories of music are searchable and streamable. How did we get here? And what does our current situation mean for the contemporary musician? In this seminar, we will survey the bumpy terrain of digital culture and listen widely: to professionals in concert; to amateurs on social media; to explanatory and “how to” videos; to historical recordings newly brought into circulation; to web-based, interactive sound installations. We will connect scholarly writing to journalism, blog posts, Wikipedia entries, and artist websites. As a result, “past” composers will come in contact with “new” media, “old” recordings with “new” methods for circulation, “classical” music with “popular” culture, and more!
BUILDING: NSL | ROOM: 404
OFFERED: Fall Spring Summer
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MHS 590
JAKELSKI L
M
13:35 - 15:25
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Music and Politics: How have musical works, compositional techniques, and performance practices contributed to the creation of national identities? In what ways has music been used to support political regimes, and how has it served as a vehicle for political protest? What roles has music played in periods of war and political upheaval, how has music been used to commemorate the past, and how do musicians interact in an increasingly global world? This course will probe the frequently messy intersections between music and politics in Europe and the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Our primary tasks will be to listen critically to a broad repertoire, analyze primary source readings, and engage with recent writings on music history to establish an understanding of how music has influenced—and been influenced by—a variety of political contexts.
BUILDING: NSL | ROOM: 404
OFFERED: Fall Spring Summer
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| Monday and Wednesday |
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AH 442
LEWIS J
MW
10:25 - 11:40
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The French author Roland Barthes described the emergence of photography in the early 19th century as a “truly unprecedented type of consciousness.” This class traces the emergence of this photographic consciousness in the 19th century as it develops within a number of specific arenas of culture & representation, from the medium’s conception in the early 19th century to its modernization in the early 20th century. The class will allow for general discussion of the history of photography with some detailed discussion of particular photographers, images, & texts. The class will look at photography as a cultural phenomenon as much as an art form, critically studying the various discursive arenas that this new medium helped to foster and redefine. We will also ask what makes photographic images so compelling, what we expect to see in them & what, distinguishes in the photographic realm a document from an artwork, & an ephemeral image from a material object.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 502
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ANT 457
SUM C
MW
12:30 - 13:45
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This course examines the dramatic changes that have occurred in the People’s Republic of China in the last forty years from the viewpoint of the people who lived through those changes. We will look at the implications of China’s transforming political economy for daily life and work. We will start with questioning and deconstructing some popular misunderstandings about China. We will then turn to reading about the lives and struggles of the vast but often marginalized populations, including rural inhabitants, ethnic minorities, and migrant workers. We will also discuss the present and future development of China’s global role and democratic trajectory, and the opportunities and challenges encountered by post-reform China and its ruling regime in the midst of economic transition and globalization. The course aims to introduce students—regardless of prior knowledge in East Asia and cultural anthropology—to analytical tools/vocabulary to engage in meaningful conversations about Chinese politics and society
BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 105
OFFERED: Fall Spring
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| Tuesday |
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AH 598
HEUER C
T
16:50 - 19:30
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The speed of recent ecological change has reframed many assumptions about the discourses and practices of “nature.” Where does this leave art history? This course will pose “ecology” as a potential method as well as a theme of art. Our subjects include literal convergences of art and earth (1970s earth art, Baroque garden design), rhetorical discourses of environmental interconnectedness or estrangement (Nathan Hare’s “Black Ecology”) performative landscape/body situations (plein air drawing, agricultural labor), and social ecologies (environmental racism, the social politics of resource extraction, legislative art, the ecosystem of the artworld). Above all, our seminar will rethink art and ecology in material-practical terms, looking (among elsewhere) the sciences, for alternatives to tropes of “landscape” and “place.”
BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 206
OFFERED: Fall
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MHS 590
ESSE M
T
13:35 - 15:25
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The Musician’s Body: This course combines a critical-historical survey of movement strategies for musicians with experiential practice. As we explore how bodily theories and techniques were integrated with music pedagogy from the late eighteenth century to the present, students will immerse themselves in different somatic practices through group and individual study. Along the way, we will touch on questions that have long occupied music pedagogues—what is the proper role for conscious awareness and control of the body in music-making, which Western culture alternately represents as the free outpouring of feeling and the result of rigorous discipline? How have both bodily knowledge and bodily practices been put to use in teaching musicians better ways to “use” their primary instruments—their selves? We will focus on both the emergence of scientific understandings of the performing body and perspectives that emphasized more “natural” forms of movement and performance.
BUILDING: OSL | ROOM: 101
OFFERED: Fall Spring Summer
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MHS 590
ROLF M
T
12:35 - 15:25
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Debussy and Symbolism: In many ways, Debussy’s unique compositional vocabulary emanated from his response to texts by Symbolists - poets such as Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé. He was especially sensitive to issues of prosody and poetic structure, shunning a traditional approach to word painting. Students in this seminar will focus on poetic and musical analyses of representative songs, situating this repertoire in the context of contemporary aesthetics and culture. Weekly readings and class participation, a short lecture recital or class presentation, and a final term paper will be required. Singers and pianists in the class will receive weekly coaching. This seminar will be open to doctoral- and masters-level students. French proficiency, though advantageous for the student, is not required.
BUILDING: MC | ROOM: 1
OFFERED: Fall
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| Wednesday |
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MHS 590
KYKER J
W
10:35 - 12:25
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Acoustic Africa: Through film clips, audio examples, readings, and hands-on performance clinics, students in this course will take a journey in sound across Sub-Saharan Africa. We will explore the musical and social dimensions of a wide variety of genres and styles, ranging from pre-colonial instruments such as the mbira, kora, and balafon to 20th and 21st century urban popular music, such as the acoustic guitar music ubiquitous across the continent.
BUILDING: NSL | ROOM: 404
OFFERED: Fall Spring Summer
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MHS 590
FREITAS R
W
15:35 - 17:25
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19th Century Performance Practice: This seminar will explore the nature of performance and performance style in the nineteenth century, a new but burgeoning field of inquiry. We will investigate not only how musicians played and sang in different times and places, but also in what performance contexts. In addition to recently published studies, we will work with primary treatises (on various instruments and the voice) and increasingly available early recordings. This class will offer an opportunity not only for original research, but also for free experimentation with what can sometimes seem a remarkably foreign performance tradition. A final project, presented to the seminar, will be required.
BUILDING: NSL | ROOM: 404
OFFERED: Fall Spring Summer
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MUY 591
JAKELSKI L
W
12:35 - 15:25
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Music and the Cold War: Music was played for high stakes in the Cold War. Beginning in the late 1940s, the United States and the Soviet Union strove to prove their supremacy in contests of cultural prowess. The struggle between the two great powers of the Cold War likewise impacted cultural policy and musical life in the nations that lay within their competing spheres of influence. This course will examine the compositional trends, artistic debates, and musical institutions that arose in response to the era’s global political conflict.We will investigate musical life during the Cold War from several distinct geopolitical vantage points. We will examine primary sources, read recent scholarship, and discuss music that either provoked significant critical reactions or sheds light on the politicization of music in the mid-twentieth century. Our main task will be to think about how local concerns intersected with the Cold War’s broader issues.
BUILDING: NSL | ROOM: 404
OFFERED: Fall
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| Thursday |
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MHS 590
THYM J
R
9:35 - 11:25
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"Beethoven and After Beethoven." Study of Beethoven's symphonies and related works from an analytical and contextual angle. The first half of the seminar will focus on Beethoven's pathbreaking Eroica of 1804, in which he transferred his "new way" of composing to a large-scale orchestral work. The Eroica as well as other symphonies from his so-called "Heroic Phase", set the course of the genre for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Nothing written later escaped the gravitational force of Beethoven's compositions: The symphony after 1800 increasingly turned away from being close to chamber music and became a public genre, counting on and addressing large audiences. The second half of the seminar will focus on symphonies (and symphonic poems) after Beethoven, sampling from the repertory of Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Strauss.
BUILDING: NSL | ROOM: 404
OFFERED: Fall Spring Summer
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| Friday |
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MUY 591
DESAI-STEPHEN
F
9:35 - 12:25
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Music, Value, and Labor: This course analyzes issues of production, exchange, and value in relation to musical sound and practice. How does music participate in colonial, capitalist, and neoliberal economic formations? Can we articulate value in relation to music in ways that both acknowledge and exceed materialist-economic terms? What forms of labor undergird the production and circulation of music as commodity form and affective experience? In order to consider such questions, we will read foundational cultural Marxist theorists (including Marx, Gramsci, Hall, Bourdieu, and more) and trace how these ideas and approaches have informed musical scholarship across popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and musicology. Together, we will work to articulate a political economic approach to the study of music.
BUILDING: NSL | ROOM: 404
OFFERED: Fall
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