Spring 2022 Graduate Seminars
Music 620 301. Creative/Comp Approaches
Natacha Diels. Wednesday 145-445 p.m. Lerner Conference Room
This course focuses on methods for thinking and engaging creatively through sound, whether compositionally or through other kinds of sound objects. Topics may include: compositional strategies; recording and producing; film; sound installations; experimental ethnography; sound art; and performance practice. Students will begin to put these methodological ideas into practice by developing semester-long projects. These projects can be individual or collaborative.
The Spring 2022 seminar explores trends in music composition since 2000. Each meeting will focus on the work of one or two composers creating work that is representative of a particular facet of the most recent two decades of contemporary music. Topics include the ‘new discipline’, alternate tuning structures, non-time-based composition, and post-minimalism. The course includes guest lectures by leaders in the field and student presentations.
Music 700 301. History of Black Composers: 1960 - 2020
Tyshawn Sorey. Monday 330-630 p.m. Lerner Conference room
Seminar in selected compositional problems, with emphasis on written projects. See department website (under course tab) for current term course description: https://music.sas.upenn.edu
Music 705 301 Theorizing the Caribbean
Timothy Rommen. Thursday 145-445 p.m. Lerner Conference room
This semester we will explore the historical and contemporary shapes of critical and social theory within the Caribbean. Our explorations will be framed by readings that illustrate not only the abiding issues that have confronted Caribbean societies, but also the changing terrain upon which solutions to those issues have been sought and articulated. We will consider themes such as: anti-colonial and postcolonial thought; diaspora and creolization; transatlantic circulations; coloniality/decoloniality; sovereignty and non-sovereign futures; the poetics of relation; and archipelagic thought.
Along the way, we will have occasion to engage with the work of a wide range of scholars, including, Hilary Beckles, Yarimar Bonilla, Aimé Césaire, Belinda Edmondson, Franz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, Aaron Kamugisha, Walter Mignolo, Fernando Ortiz, Shalini Puri, Raquel Rivera, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Derek Walcott, and Sylvia Wynter, among many others. As we discuss, and workshop the ideas we encounter in their work, we will be especially attentive to the ways that music and the performing arts participate in mobilizing and sounding out theory in the Caribbean and beyond.
Music 998 001. Composition Studio and Forum
Tyshawn Sorey. Wednesday 515-715. Lerner Room 102
Composer's Forum is a regular meeting of graduate composers, often along with other members of the Penn composing community, in which recent performances are discussed, musical issues taken up, and visitors occasionally welcomed to present their work or offer master classes. In addition to weekly Forum meetings, students will be paired with a composer for individual lessons in composition. Ph.d. Candidates in Composition in their third year in the program will continue non-credit participation in both forum and lessons.