Graduate Courses
Archives of previous course offerings
Spring 2010
Music 226: 19th Century Orchestral Music
Larry Todd. Monday, 11:55 AM- 2:25 PM
A proseminar devoted to orchestral music of the nineteenth-century (either the "short" or "long" century), with emphasis on major works by composers ranging from Haydn to Mahler. Repertoire may be drawn from, but not exclusively limited to, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel, Robert Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Dvorak, Bruckner, Amy Beach, and other composers, with analytical readings of representative works. Students will be asked to write a research paper on some aspect of nineteenth-century orchestral music (i.e., treating in some way analysis from a historical/theoretical standpoint, orchestration, the question of genre and/or aesthetics, and the like), and to present their findings before the class.
Music 382: Studies in Ethnomusicology: "Thinking in Mbira"
Paul Berliner. Thursday, 3:05 PM-5:35PM
The objective of this course is to enable students to develop a comprehensive understanding of one of the large mbiras performed professionally in Zimbabwe, the 22-key mbira dzavadzimu. Readings will explore the instrument’s history, its repertory and associated performance practices, its deep religious role in Shona society. Ethnographic films/videos made in Zimbabwe will amplify themes raised by readings. Beyond the course’s focus on the mbira, it is concerned with exposing students to ethnomusicological research methods, interdisciplinary approaches to musical understanding, and collaborative research. Class periods are devoted to discussing reading assignments, analyzing musical examples, and learning to perform four compositions for the mbira dzavadzimu. The experiential aspects of the course emphasize "traditional" African oral/aural teaching methods which require students to grasp musical ideas as they performed, rather than absorbing ideas from music notation. Complementing aural approached to grasping mbira music in the second half of the semester, students will devise their own notation systems and explore the challenges of transcribing mbira pieces for the purpose of analysis. Grades will be based on class participation, performance exams, and an analytical paper concerning different pedagogical approaches to mbira music and the challenges of transcribing/representing the structures of the mbira repertory. In the second half of the semester, we will be joined by a visiting artist from Zimbabwe, mbira master Cosmas Magaya.
Music 217: Introduction to Post-Tonal Analysis and Theory
Philip Rupprecht. Monday, 3:05 PM-5:35 PM
An introduction to the analysis and theory of so-called "post-tonal" twentieth- and twenty-first-century music. We will explore standard concepts essential to the analysis of a wide field of repertory: pitch-class sets, transposition and inversion relations, pitch symmetry, centricity, twelve-time operations, rhythmic cycles, and textural innovations. Beyond these specific conceptual concerns, the seminar is very concerned with ways of writing effectively about musical gesture, expression, structure and rhetoric (assignments will include several short analytic papers, as well as a longer final paper). Music by Boulez, Birtwistle, Carter, Donatoni, Ligeti, Maxwell Davies, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Webern, Wolpe, and others. Selected readings from the analytic-theoretic literature.
Textbook: Joseph N. Straus, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, 3rd Edition (2004).
Music 223: William Byrd and the Instrumental Tradition
Kerry McCarthy. Wednesday, 3:05 PM-5:35 PM.
If every note of Byrd's vocal music had been lost, he would still be considered a first-rate composer on the strength of his instrumental works. This sets him apart from his colleagues in the standard "high Renaissance" canon. His instrumental music was central to the establishment of the northern-European keyboard tradition (Sweelinck, Buxtehude, and beyond), and ultimately to the development of common-practice tonality as we know it. This seminar will deal with Byrd's instrumental works: dance forms, settings of ground basses and other pre-existing material, string accompaniments to solo songs, and freely-composed fantasias for keyboard or viol consort. We will study a large variety of music, along with a judicious selection of secondary readings.
Music 213:
Sound+Image: Multimedia Survey & Workshop
John Supko. Tuesday, 1:15 PM-3:45 PM
In 1924 Erik Satie wrote the first music specifically composed for the projection of a single film, Entr’acte by Rene Clair. Since that time, composers have allowed the moving image to influence their working methods in many ways. This seminar will explore the history of the union of sound and image, from early examples of important collaborations (Prokofiev & Eisenstein) to films made by composers (Mauricio Kagel, Tony Conrad) to musical works with visual components such as the made-for-TV opera Perfect Lives by Robert Ashley. This seminar is primarily a composition seminar. It will emphasize the creative work of its participants, using the survey of canonical (and not so canonical) multimedia as inspiration for new works to be created and discussed during class meetings. During the first weeks of the semester we will determine together whether our creative projects will be individual in nature or in some way collaborative.
Class meetings will take place in the Smith Warehouse computer lab, where participants will have access to a wide range of applications and hardware with which to develop their work. It is expected that the works originating from this seminar will eventually be made available on the internet.