Fall 2019 Graduate Seminars

Music 520 001,  Orchestration, James Primosch.  Tuesday 130-430 p.m., Lerner 210

This course will feature visits by various instrumentalists who will demonstrate excerpts from the standard repertoire as well as extended performance techniques. Students will write short examples for the instrumentalists to read. Students will also orchestrate a Debussy piano piece, prepare a piano reduction of a portion of a Mahler symphony, and offer presentations on relevant contemporary instrumental repertoire.

 

ANTH 559 401, Audio Ethnography (Crosslisted with MUSC559), Ernst Karel.  Lecture Thursday 130-430 p.m./Listening Lab Tuesday 6-900 p.m., Van Pelt Seminar Room 452.1

This is an intensive, graduate-level, practice-based course in which students will record, edit, and produce anthropologically informed audio works that record and interpret culture and lived experience. Hearing is of course fundamentally important to anthropological practice, as is sight, and yet ethnographies tend to rely on a very attenuated acoustic manifestation of culture: transcribed dialogue. Projects in this class will look beyond conventional linguistic or musical codes to sounds whose semiotic or affective value may be less immediately evident. Through the process of making location recordings, analyzing those recordings, composing them into autonomous works, and critiquing every step of the way, this course will engage with questions of ethnographic representation through the medium of sound.

 

Music 604 401, Historiography and Method: Performance Studies (Crosslisted with ITAL602 and COML602), Mauro Calcagno.  Friday 200-500 p.m., Lerner Conference Room

 

This proseminar in Historical Musicology (604) explores theories and models of historical investigation through works that exemplify particular approaches, such as transnational, environmental/landscape, gender/sexuality, critical race studies, performance studies, archives, and the digital humanities. This instantiation is devoted to performance studies. || “Performance” is a term used differently within a variety of academic disciplines and human activities (theatre, anthropology, visual arts, business, sports, politics, science) signaling “a wide range of human behaviors” (D. Taylor). In connection to an explosion of scholarship in performance studies during the last forty years, we will explore the relationship between this wide constellation of meanings on the one hand, and today’s music, theatre and dance performances on the other (generally subsumed under the terms “avant-garde” or "experimental" but also including ritual events outside the Euro-American area, with related anthropological approaches). Readings from the main theorists and practitioners will be included (from Brecht, Appia and Artaud, to Turner, Schechner, LeCompte, Wilson, Pavis, Fischer-Lichte, Lehmann, Castellucci, Cook, Abbate, Levin, and Le Guin). The repertoire and case studies will include mostly works from the Baroque (or Early Modern) period, raising specific historiographical issues (incl. today’s performance practices). Among the topics and concepts covered: research and writing methodologies, agency, performativity, reconstruction and re-enactment, technology and mediation, materiality, spectrality, gender, dance and movement, uses of body and voice, text vs. performance, history and memory, and intercultural and postdramatic approaches.

 

Music 700 301, Seminar in Composition:  Systematic Strategies in 20th- and 21st-Century Music Composition,  Marcos Balter.  Friday 2-500 p.m., Lerner 210

This course will examine different ways in which some composers have used systematic approaches in their compositional discourses since the beginning of the 20th century. Works systematically employing set-theory, serialist, spectral, minimalist/post-minimalist, stochastic, algorithmic, and computer-assisted techniques – among others – will be examined through on-score analysis, in-class discussion, and supplemental readings.

 

Music 750 301.  Seminar in Musicolocogy, Laura Protano-Biggs (Visiting Professor from Peabody Institute of the John Hopkins University).  Monday 2-500 p.m., Lerner Conference Room

Description:  To be announced.

 

Music 770 401, Seminar in Afro-American Music (Crosslisted with AFRC770), Guthrie Ramsey.  Wednesday 2-500 p.m., Lerner Conference Room.

Description:  To be Announced.