Seminar on selected topics in music theory and analysis.

This course will consider the American musical landscape from the colonial period to the present with an emphasis, though not exclusive focus, on non-written traditions. The course is not a chronological journey, but rather a topical treatment of the various issues in the history of American music. Some of the specific, project-oriented activities of the course will consist of, but will not be limited to the following: (1)participating in the development of a traveling exhibition on the Apollo Theater for the SmithsonianInstitution; (2)development of a permanent website for a history of jazz course at Penn; (3)reviewing two manuscripts for publication to a major press; (4)developing a working proposal for a history of African American music. In this context students will learn the basics of contemporary music criticism, including: identifying a work's significant musical gestures; positioning those gestures within a broader field of musical rhetoric, conventions, and social contracts; and theorizing the conventions with respect to large systems of cultural knowledge, such as historical, geographical contexts as well as the lived experiences of audiences, composers, performers, and dancers. Other topics covered: origin and development of American popular music and gendered and racial aspects of American classical music.

Seminar on selected topics in the music of the twentieth century.

This course will explore the main repertories of medieval lyric from the dual perspectives of words and music (and disciplinary perspectives of musicology and literary studies). Our focus will be vernacular song and poetry from the latethirteenth to early fifteenth centuries, including detailed exploration of some of the following: polytextual motet, music and poetry of Adam de la halle, the Roman de Fauvel, Machaut,Ciconia and some early Dufay. In exploring how late thirteenth-century writers and composers defined themselves as part of a tradition, we will also look back to their 'history' -- to the repertory of troubadour lyrics. The course will place particular emphasis on the ways medieval writers and musicians construed their creations, and the many productive tensions between language and sound; singing and speaking; words and music. We will explore how that concern with etymologies of song played out not only in the lyrics themselves, but also in theoretical writing about song, and in its manuscript representation and codification. Included in our discussions will be writings by Johannes de Grocheio, Philippe de Vitry, Brunetto Latini and Deschamps, and consideration of a range of chansonniers, including the Chansonnier du roi, the Montpellier codex, and the Machuat manuscripts.

Topics in Ethnomusicology. Spring 2010: Imagining Africa Musically: This seminar considers ways in which scholars write about and imagine the African continent through the lens of musical performance. We will consider a range of writings about Africa as a continent, regionally, and nationally, including north Africa and the Maghreb through series of themes including: diaspora, cosmopolitanism, gender, spirituality, and as world music. This is a reading and listening intensive seminar.

Seminar in selected compositional problems, with emphasis on written projects.

Guidance in preparation of the A.M. essay in the history and theory of music.

Guidance in preparation of the A.M. portfolio in composition.