MUSIC-GA 2162, Section 001
ONLINE
Tuesdays 10:30am to 12:30pm
Instructor: Jaime Oliver
Course Description: Examination of techniques of music composition as they are applied to the creation of musical works. Compositional practice is studied and evaluated both from the standpoint of craft and aesthetics. Students create compositions, and works are performed in public concerts.
Special Studies: Music and the Construction of Race
MUSIC-GA 2198, Section 003
ONLINE
Mondays 2pm to 4pm
Instructor: Maureen Mahon
Course Description: The idea that race is a social construction that has concrete impact on everyday life in the United States and elsewhere has become a commonplace in the humanities and social sciences. In this course, we will examine the ways scholars have analyzed processes of racial construction in relation to music and sound. We will read work by cultural critics, historians, ethnomusicologists, and musicologists, and take up the following questions: How do constructions of race affect experiences and understandings of music and the sonic? How have people created and contested racial identities and meanings through their participation in music? What role has the sonic realm played in the construction and perpetuation of race? How does race interact with other categories of identity such as ethnicity, nationality, gender, and sexuality in relation to music and sound? What can we learn about music and sound by focusing on race? What can we learn about race by focusing on music and sound? Throughout, we will attend to the methodological approaches, theoretical frameworks, sources, archives, and modes of discourse that scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of music studies have deployed to explore historical and contemporary practices of sounding race.
MUSIC-GA 2198, Section 004
ONLINE
Wednesdays 2pm to 4pm
Instructor: Christine Dang
Course Description: This seminar aims to situate individual research trajectories within increasingly volatile technological, environmental, and academic ecosystems. The historical event to which we will frequently refer is the COVID-19 pandemic. We will think about the ways in which the pandemic has accelerated, intensified, and transformed debates that had already been percolating within our discipline during the past decades: debates on the place of music and sound studies in a changing academy; on the increasing digitization of scholarly activity; on the relationship between the humanities to the sciences; and on the possible links between musical practice and health, both individual and planetary. During the first weeks, we will read theoretical texts to help us think broadly about music and sound in relation to technology, the body, and place/space. The bulk of the seminar's readings will be tailored toward individual projects.
Special Studies: Precarious Songs of the Anthropocene
MUSIC-GA 2198, Section 005
ONLINE
Wednesdays 4pm to 6pm
Instructor: J. Martin Daughtry
Course Description: This collaborative seminar is designed for graduate students who are working at the intersection of voice/sound/music/listening and environment/climate change/“anthropocene”/precarity. We will read current scholarship on posthumanism and the environmental humanities; analyze music and sound art that engages with environmental themes; discuss a model of “atmospheric vocality” that I am currently developing; and critique and nurture one another's works-in-progress. After a few weeks led by me, seminar participants will work as a collective: developing the list of works to be encountered, determining the direction of our discussions, and generating a short list of guest scholars and/or artists.
Special Studies: Salon, Varieté, Phonogram Archive
MUSIC-GA 2199, Section 001
ONLINE
Thursdays 10:30am to 12:30pm
Instructor: Brigid Cohen
Course Description: This project is a study of three German-Jewish musical spaces in Berlin, where dilemmas of minoritarian citizenship played out in relation to questions of nation and empire from 1820 to 1920. Toward this end, we will focus on an unusual constellation of scenes that featured joint Jewish-Gentile leadership: (a) the salon; (b) the popular stage (circus, varieté, and theater revue); and (c) the scientific sound laboratory. In the first case, centered around the salon of Fanny Hensel, a haute bourgeois woman of Jewish descent curated influential discussions of world culture and notions of the Orient within semi-private musical settings, while staving off anti-Semitic stereotypes of the social parvenu. In my second case, itinerant Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe found upward mobility on the late 19th-century popular stage, conjuring pictures of the German “home” and the “exotic” colonies in musical comedy, acrobatics, and drama. In the third case, assimilated German-Jewish scholars countered notions of biological racism while furthering high imperial projects of knowledge production through the collection and archiving of musical recordings from throughout the world. While studying these musical scenes, we will read in political theory, studies of imperialism, citizenship, postcolonialism, history of race, Jewish studies, and media theory. Theorists at the center of this study will include Arendt, Benjamin, Mbembe, Mignolo, Stoler, Said, and Gilroy.
Reading and Research
MUSIC-GA 3119
Independent study with a faculty supervisor. Must have the approval of the director of graduate studies and the proposed supervisor.
Reading and Research
MUSIC-GA 3120
Independent study with a faculty supervisor. Must have the approval of the director of graduate studies and the proposed supervisor.