Spring 2025 Graduate Seminars
Music 6700 301. Analytical and Theoretical Approaches.
Anna Weesner. Fridays 10:15 a.m- 1:14 p.m Room: LERN CONF
Analytical and Theoretical Approaches In spring, 2025, this course will begin with consideration of various approaches to common practice tonality and follow threads through repertoires of both concert and pop music. Many questions will concern connections between music analysis and compositional technique. We’ll consider a wide range of composers and musicians, including Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Kurtag, Ligeti, Weir, as well as a variety of pop songs. We will take a kind of iceberg approach—straightforward surface with greater depths lurking below—to musical topics often taken for granted, taking up basic questions of form, such as the phrase and the cadence, smaller-scale notions, such as motive, hook, theme, and gesture, and larger concerns like style analysis and questions of tonality vs. non-tonality. Harmony will be our starting place, with other parameters, especially texture and rhythm, considered as a natural part of the mix. Simple composition exercises will be deployed from time to time in the service of analytical pursuits.
Music 7200 301. Seminar in Composition.
Tyshawn Sorey. Wednesdays 10:15 a.m- 1:14 p.m Room: LERN 210
Composing While Black in America: 1965-2025 (formerly Music of Afrodiasporic Composers)
This course will consider various spontaneous and composed works exclusively by Afro-Diasporic composers in the United States that date from 1965 through the present day. While this course is designed largely for listening, critiquing, and writing extensively about compositions heard in seminar meetings, it also draws upon literature by composers, performers, and ethno/musicologists and may also draw from African American studies, improvisation, visual art, contemporary trends in American Popular musics, and other forms of composition.
Music 7210 001. Composition Studio and Forum.
Tyshawn Sorey. Wednesdays 3:30 p.m- 6:29 p.m Room: BENN 419
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.
Music 7360 301. Topics in Musicology.
Glenda Goodman, Mary Caldwell. Thursdays 1:45 p.m- 4:44 p.m Room: LERN CONF
Singing Faiths: Music and Religious Conversion
“Singing Faiths” analyzes the historical role of music in religious conversion. Cataclysmic or rote, ecstatic or mundane, this seminar makes the claim that music played a central role in religious conversions across time and place. Two avenues of approach lead us into this topic: first, to what extent was music a tool in projects of domination? And second, how and why has music inspired voluntary conversion? This seminar focuses primarily on conversion to and among Abrahamic faiths in a long period that saw unprecedented encounters between peoples of different beliefs. We adopt a wide scope, from the medieval to early modern periods, and focus largely (but not exclusively) on the remarkable capacity for European agents to extend religious influence transregionally as they extended their own sectarian (and at times ethnic and racial) beliefs as far as possible. This aspiration to globality–to envision the world as a connected whole–resulted in musical practices and repertoires traveling far and wide and linked music to missionization, conquest, and colonialism.
Students will learn how to deploy the concept of conversion as they train in the fundamental historical skill of recognizing change over time and interpreting ambiguous and fragmentary archives. Students will also gain strength in the scholarly techniques and methodologies in historical musicology and become conversant with broader concepts of conversion from religious and cultural studies. By delving into case studies that interrogate the musical influences and reverberations of religious transformations, students will come to understand in a granular way what it takes to make a convincing historical argument using music and other sources.
“Singing Faiths” embraces a pedagogical practice of collaboration that is fundamental to both Professor Caldwell and Goodman’s scholarly praxes. Thus, rather than proceed chronologically from the medieval to early modern periods, we have organized the seminar thematically so as to better foster conversion and understanding that is both deeply informed by our areas of expertise and capable of extending to other areas. Seminar themes will include performing conversion; contrafacture as musical and textual conversion; globality and religious transformation; conflict and conversion; sacralization and the sourcing of music and sound; notation and its limits; temporality and religious change through music; and conversion metaphors, among others.
Music 7500 301. Seminar in Ethnomusicology
Carol Muller. Wednesdays 5:15 p.m - 8:14 p.m Room: LERN CONF
Deep Listening to the Music of Africa, Old and New Diasporas
In Born in Blackness (2021), Howard French argues that while the modern world economy was built on the backs of African slaves, Africa has been written out of this history. Musically, academics have mostly believed that because there is so little African music writing, we cannot know the deep musical past of Africa and her peoples. In this seminar we will read, listen to, view, experience, create projects focused on the full complexity and diversity of the music of Africa. We will reflect on ways in which we might come to know the deep past of the place of human origins—we will use science, archeology, fossil evidence, anthropology, and orally transmitted knowledge to come to an understanding of the deep African past as it speaks to the contemporary moment. We will divide the continent into five geographic regions: Southern, East, Central, West and North; add in the Sahel; the surrounding islands and bodies of water; and expand our ideas of diaspora from the long and complex history of slavery across many pieces of land and water around the world, ending up in the present moment in the United States. We will engage with contemporary African music making in the city of Philadelphia, and as it comes to other places in the United States. To the best of our ability, the sources of our knowledge will have been generated by African scholars in an effort to decolonize our study of the African continent. All are welcome in this seminar.
Music 7700 301. Studies in Theory and Analysis.
Michael Klein. Tuesdays 1:45 p.m - 4:44 p.m Room: LERN CONF
Film and the Formation of the Modern Subject
Cultures constantly replicate themselves to maintain power relations that will keep people (subjects) in their place. With its fantasies of the image, sound, and narrative, films are among the most powerful ideological tools (Althusser would say “Ideological State Apparatuses”: quite a phrase to unpack) in shaping culture. In this seminar we will study theories of both subjectivity and film (especially in terms of sound). Readings will include work by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, and others in terms of subjectivity. For film, we will read Michel Chion, Claudia Gorbman, Robyn Stilwell, and others. Films will come primarily from the digital age and will include Everything, Everywhere All at Once, Snowpiercer, Black Panther, Spirited Away, and many others in whole or part. The objective is to understand how the three fantasies of film, sound in particular, address us and make us as subjects in the neoliberal world.