Spring 2024 Graduate Seminars
Music 6220 301. Composing with Electronics
Natacha Diels. Mondays 10:15 a.m- 1:14 p.m Room: LERN CONF
This is a graduate level course intended for composers. Students will acquire a base level of diverse skills in utilizing electronics throughout the semester, including hardware and software applications. Topics include concert setup, using and teaching a DAW, basics of microcontrollers, and synthesis principles.
Music 6500 301. Deep Listening: Ethnographic and Anthropological Approaches.
Carol Muller. Wednesdays 5:15 p.m- 8:14 p.m Room: LERN CONF
In this class we will engage with a variety of research and representational methods and media used to document and understand the relationships between human, non-human animals, and the environment. While traditionally ethnomusicology has been defined as the study of music in/as culture, we are coming to understand with the availability of new sound recording technologies, and post-colonial engagement with indigenous knowledge systems, that to fully grasp human sound production we need to expand how we see, hear, and know the world, and that we have much to learn from indigenous ways of understanding the world, from the non-human animal world, and from the natural environment. We will host a number of important scholars/community intellectuals to open up this field as a way of knowing sound/music making in the contemporary world. There is a group field project located in Philadelphia's amazing black music history.
The class is open to graduate and upper level undergraduate students.
Music 7201 401. Computer Musc I
Natacha Diels. Tuesdays 1:45 p.m- 4:44 p.m Room: LERN CONF
This is a beginner-level undergrad/grad level course teaching the software Max/MSP. Students will learn to use this visual programming language through assignments and creative projects.
Music 7210 001. Composition Studio and Forum
Anna Weesner. Wednesdays 3:30 p.m- 5:29 p.m Room: BENN 419
Music 7361 401. Topics in Musicology
Mauro Calcagno. Fridays 12:00 p.m- 2:59 p.m Room: LERN CONF
This seminar will explore how opera composers, librettists, singers, and directors have used time to create dramatic and musical effects. We will study a range of musical works from the Baroque period as well as the last two decades and examine the correlation between operatic temporality and broader philosophical and historical concepts of time. This seminar is designed for both musicologists and non-musicologists, therefore prior knowledge of music notation is not necessary.
Music 7700 301. Studies in Music Theory and Analysis
Jairo Moreno. Mondays 1:45 p.m - 4:44 p.m Room: VANP 452.1
The seminar will focus on a set of four concepts that bear on music and sound studies in our time. These concepts carry methodological implications for historical, ethnographic, and music analytical work and they form part of what increasingly becomes today a vast assemblage of ideas in equally increasingly entangled worlds. Rather than disentangling these worlds, we seek to better track and try to understand their relations. Each concept will give us a point of access to studying those relations and not a delimited set of tools or definitive answers to the many matters of concern that each of them might (yet) address. Although the set of concepts is very small, by design, the seminar will give us a general conceptual matrix on which to pursue our respective interests and to identify other concepts that may emerge in the context of our study as fundamental to our work. The seminar is organized in four three-week units, preceded by a two-week introduction to method where we will study dialectic, genealogy, assemblage, and materiality. In each unit, we will spend two weeks discussing, reading, seeing/listening relevant materials, followed by a one-week practicum in which we will present a short study reflecting our newly formed entanglement with a concept. We will have distinguished guests to help us discuss their work. The four concepts are: Capitalism; Climate; Globality; Race.