Graduate Program Curriculum

Graduate Handbook (includes outline of required courses) link to pdf file

Graduate Course Descriptions

Fall 2013

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Jim Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA

Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 515: 20th Century Analysis, Jay Reise
Wednesday 2 - 5 p.m., Music Building 210

Music 590: Auditory Cultures: On Sound and Double Consciousness, Tsitsi Ella Jaji
[Crosslisted with ENGL 590.401, AFRD 590, COML 590]Thursdays 12-3:00 pm, BENN 140

W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 using musical incipits from the sorrow songs to begin each chapter, laying a template for theorizing the lived experience of race in the U.S. in sonic terms. In the next decades writers continued to foreground sound in debates about the link between cultural forms and identity, and particularly the uses of the vernacular. For scholars like James W. Johnson, Alain Locke, and Zora Neale Hurston anthologizing and interpreting African American cultural production involved tracing auditory forms of music, sermons, and folklore alongside literature. This class will take their approach as a starting point, to examine the role of sound in primary works by key figures working around and across Black Atlantic from 1890-1939, with some context before and after this period. Authors studied will include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sol Plaatje, John and Nokutela Dube, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Nicolás Guillén, Claude McKay, and Leon Gontran Damas along with composers Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Florence Price, and performers Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. These primary texts will be read in conversation with theoretical works that foreground auditory sensibilities by thinkers including Theodor Adorno, Jacques Attali, Josh Kun, Angela Davis, Farah Jasmine Griffin and others. We will also draw on recent special issues of American Quarterly (September 2011) and Social Text (Spring 2010) devoted to sound.

Music 620: Analytical Methods Tonal Music, Jairo Moreno
Thursday, 2-5 p.m., Music Building 210

Music 700: Seminar in Composition, Anna Weesner
Monday, 2-5 p.m., Music Building 210

Music 705: Seminar in Ethnomusicology, Tim Rommen
Tuesday, 2-5 p.m., Marian Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Music 790: Topics in Musicology, Emily Dolan
Friday, 2-5 p.m. Music Building Conference Room

What is Sound Art? Grove tells us that the term encompasses "Sound installation, Sound sculpture, Performance art, Soundscape composition, soundwalking, field recording, circuit bending, sound design, interactive sonic games, concrete poetry, conceptual art, and creative experiments with listening and audio media... experimental electronic music, ambient music, noise music, and collage-based music." This year, the Museum of Modern Art is mounting its first major Sound Art exhibit (Soundings: A Contemporary Score, 10 August- 3 November.) This seminar will examine some of the many practices that are known as sound art. We will begin our explorations by delving into the field of Sound Studies. Over the semester, we will consider the themes such as the history of noise, nature music and environmental recording, and the relationship between sound art and the history of musical technology. In early October, we will visit MOMA as a class. As part of the seminar, students will be expected to write a research paper and to complete a creative project.

Spring 2013

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Jim Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA

Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 530: Electronic Music, Jim Primosch
Monday 2-5, Music Building, Room 210

The course will focus on students' compositional projects. Short studies working with particular hardware and software will be assigned, but student-initiated projects will predominate. Recent and historical examples from the literature will be considered and discussed.

Music 630: Perspectives on a String Quartet, Anna Weesner
Wednesday 2-5, Music Building, Room 102

Co-taught by the Daedalus Quartet and Prof. Anna Weesner, this seminar will revolve around a core repertoire of three pieces, including Beethoven, op. 127, Berg, op. 3 and The Space Between (2012) by Anna Weesner.

We will approach the music from a variety of angles, giving attention to issues of composition, performance, analysis, theory, history, and listening itself. There will be opportunities to work directly with members of the Daedalus Quartet, who will be present at approximately half of the class meetings. The work of the seminar will take a variety of forms, and may be adjusted to suit the interests of the particular student, involving composition, performance, writing, analyzing and presenting.

The Space Between, which is the title of my own piece for quartet, might also stand as the title for a preoccupation of mine. That is, I am interested (as a composer) in exploring points of stylistic reference in music as occupying a spectrum from, say, quotation, or "common currency" to abstraction. This topic relates to questions about musical texture, about hierarchy in texture, about the role or meaning of melody and about the notion of "play" in music making. What happens in the space between performer, composer and listener in the unfolding of a piece of music? In what ways can performance practice be an acknowledged part of the mix for all involved?

Students will be encouraged to nurture musical/intellectual preoccupations of their own during the course of the seminar, and to take advantage of the workshop afforded by what we hope will be a meeting of different kinds of minds to work through issues that may be relevant in very different repertoires and musical projects.

Music 700: Seminar in Composition, Jay Reise
Thursday 2-5, Music Building, Room 210

Rhythm. In this course we will focus on the construction and development of rhythmic motives. Among the techniques treated will be the generation of rhythmic ideas, phrase construction, rhythmic counterpoint, ornamentation, and the effect of rhythm on the development of surrounding detail. Assignments will include the weekly composition of short pieces utilizing these techniques.

Music 705: Music Ownership and its Impact on Music, Musicians, and their Audiences., Anthony Seeger, Monday 2-5, Marion Anderson Seminar Room, Van Pelt Library, 4th Floor.

This seminar will examine an aspect of music that is inaudible but profoundly influential in shaping musical creation, performance, and transmission and has a profound impact on the lives of composers, performers, and audiences: who has what kinds of rights to music.  “Ownership,” variously defined around the world, has an impact on all kinds of music, including European concert forms, performances of ancient songs in remote settlements, and next month’s popular song.  Ideas about ownership and control are often profoundly linked to ideas about the nature of music, concepts of the person, and the definition of creativity.  They are also often related to the political economy of knowledge, the capitalist market system and international affairs.  This is not a course about U.S. copyright legislation or the Internet—the issues are far broader than a single country and have a long and instructive history.  The course will examine music ownership in a number of different societies around the world, trace the development of the current Anglo-European copyright laws that have been used as models for most nations today, and consider the potential impacts of the United Nations and the World Intellectual Property Organization on current practices.  Course meetings will include discussion of readings, presentations, and guest speakers.  Course assignments will include readings, class projects, or short papers, and a longer seminar project on a subject of the student’s choice as long as it is related to the subject matter of the course. The course is open to graduate students from other departments with the permission of the instructor.

The instructor, Anthony Seeger, is a Distinguished Professor of Ethnomusicology, Emeritus, at UCLA, Director Emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and currently a Research Associate at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution.

Music 760: 20th Century Music, Jeffrey Kallberg
Thursday 2-5, Marion Anderson Seminar Room, Van Pelt Library, 4th Floor   

The course topic will be landscape and music. We will focus particularly on the role of "landscape" in the formation of modernist ideals in early 20th-century Scandinavian music. And we will read around generally in the realm of ecomusicology (with particular emphasis on the Western classical tradition).

Music 770: Research Practicum in Post-1940's Jazz, Guthrie Ramsey
Friday 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., Music Building Conference Room, 3rd Floor

This course, team taught with poet and activist Amiri Baraka, will focus on the archive of drummer, composer and activist Max Roach (1924-2007), a leading musician in the bebop movement who left a remarkable archive that has yet to be organized. The course will comprise six sessions of roundtable seminar discussions with the remaining sessions taking place in Newark, NJ, the current location of approximately 7,000 items?letters, essays, speeches, art work, fragments of a manuscript, and other ephemera?connected to Roach?s life and career. The materials will be read, organized and theorized by the students together with Baraka, who will use the results of our work to help organize his current book project on Roach.

Music 780: Seminar in Theory, Naomi Waltham-Smith
Tuesday 2-5, Marion Anderson Seminar Room, Van Pelt Library, 4th Floor

For Derrida, music is perhaps the supreme touchable-untouchable: the object of his "strongest desire," yet "completely forbidden." He fears that he does not know how to touch music, but, more than that, he fears that deconstruction's touch might be fatal to it, for like Nietzsche, Derrida figures philosophy as the hand clapped over the mouth of song. Perhaps this danger that deconstruction might extinguish what it touches also explains why there are few compelling attempts within music theory and musicology to bring this body of philosophical thinking to bear on the experience of music. When recent efforts in music studies to attend to music's sensuous materiality and the body in performance all-too-readily fall prey to deconstructive critique, the possibility of contact between these two modes of thinking becomes yet more difficult to grasp. And yet, because deconstruction arguably represents the most sustained and critically reflective engagement with phenomenology in recent Continental philosophy, it is an indispensable resource for the urgent and ambitious task facing the study of music today.

This seminar will explore the complex relationship between phenomenology and French, post-Heideggerian deconstruction and will ask what is at stake—musically, ethically and politically—in these debates for how we think about what music is and how we experience it. Derrida's confrontation with Nancy in Le toucher, in which he stages a series of tangential debates with key figures in the phenomenological tradition, will form the backbone of the reading for the course. Alongside some writings of Derrida and Nancy, we shall read short texts by their principal interlocutors across the history of Continental philosophy, including Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas and Deleuze. We shall also consider a number of musical stage works that seem to theorize the concept of touch in music, and examine—as we move from Rameau, through Mozart and Verdi, to Wagner and Strauss—how music increasingly puts in question the possibility of ever touching music. Other musics and soundscapes outside this canon will be chosen depending upon the group's interests.

Fall 2012

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Jim Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA

Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 520: Orchestration, Jim Primosch
Monday, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Music Building 210

To be Announced.

Music 525: Composition Selected Forms, Jay Reise
Thursday, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Music Building 210

To Be announced.

Music 603: Film music--Theory and Practice, Carolyn Abbate
Friday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., MB Conference Room

We will look at movies from the later silent era to the 1960s, the decades during which film music was prefigured, invented, and finally codified. Topics covered: theoretical writings on sound and music in film (Adorno/Eisler, Chion, Silverman, among others); the artisan phase of film accompaniment; technologies of film sound; how music works in conjunction with action and image; the semioticization of music in film; musical performance in film.

Music 650: Field Methods, Carol Muller
Wednesday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar room, VPL

This graduate/undergraduate seminar is part of a series of Academically Based Community Service classes that examine the relationship between music and spirituality in West Philadelphia. The purpose of the course is to give you a condensed version of the field research experience as required for doctoral dissertations in ethnomusicology or popular music studies; and to reflect on scholarly and community issues pertaining to such work. Students produce in partnership with the faith community several small research projects and a final film.

Music 750: Romantic Music: E. T. A. Hoffmann , Emily Dolan
Monday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., MB Conference Room

This seminar will explore the works of composer, critic, writer, conductor, and jurist E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). We will immerse ourselves in his music criticism, his fantastical fictional writings, as well as his musical compositions. We will examine the ways in which Hoffmann's values and vocabularies still inform the study of music today, as well as recover aspects of this singular figure that have been forgotten.

Spring 2012

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Jim Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA

Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 505: Advanced Chromatic Harmony, Jay Reise
Thursday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Music Building Room 210

This course will focus on the evolution of 19th and 20th century harmony and how it helped to define the styles of composers from Beethoven through Richard Strauss.

Music 621: 20th Century Analysis, Jairo Moreno
Tuesday 2:00- 5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

We will consider recent work on the question of listening: as a possibility for the logos, or as its negation; as a cognitive and or material phenomenon; as an event associated with some kinds of political claims--communal, ecological and theological. Guests include scholars from music theory, music history, ethnomusicology, media studies, and philosophy. Authors include Patel, Kane, Drott, Szendy, Ochoa, Cavarero, Arendt, Dyson, and Erlmann.

Music 705: Musical Expressions of the New York and Philadelphia Caribbean, Chris Washburne (Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, Columbia University), Monday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

This seminar focuses on Spanish Caribbean music traditions associated with New York City and Philadelphia. We will begin by exploring the circumambient historical space of the earliest Caribbean music expression in those East Coast cities, examining the historical developments that have positioned New York as a central hub for Caribbean music production and consumption over the last 100 years, and as a space for innovation and as well as a place for the preservation of traditions. We will then follow the trajectory of the music's multiple modes of expression in contemporary performance in both cities. Genres, such as Latin jazz, salsa, mambo, reggaeton, and hip hop, will be the main objects of study. The central concern will be the dynamic interplay of place, economics, race, ethnicity, immigration, and nationalism involved in the intercultural exchange which has been so fundamental in the production of these musics.

Music 740: New Organologies, Emily Dolan
Wesdnesday 2:00 - 5:00, Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

This seminar will explore the history of musical instruments and the diverse ways in which we can think about what they are and what they do. We will traverse topics from the first organologies—by Michael Praetorius, Sebastian Virdung, and others—to the birth of the modern discipline of organology in the twentieth century. We will think about the changing construction and function of instruments as well as their evolving uses. We will consider the way musical instruments help shape our relationship with nature and the mutual imbrication of musical and scientific instruments. I welcome students from all of the department's subfields. Undergraduates who are interested in this course should talk with me before registering.

Music 770: Sound, Historiography and Visual Culture in Hip Hop, Guthrie Ramsey
Thursday 2:00 - 5:00, Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

This course will engage the varied and dynamic literature, discography, and visual components of what has been labeled “hip-hop culture.”  While there have been numerous studies detailing and deconstructing its various elements and social meanings over the last thirty years, there have been far fewer that directly treat it as a sound phenomenon, as a subject of historiography, and as a subject or discourse in film, photography, and the broader visual art world. 

We will address the following questions and more: What are the elements of style and the mechanics of delivery in various forms of hip-hop?  How are its production values technically produced in both commercial and “underground” contexts?  What are the ideologies providing a historiography of hip-hop its logic?  To what degree has hip-hop historiography been informed by a self-reflexive, ethnographic stance when compared to other popular music forms?  Beyond its role in shaping popular fashion, in what other ways has hip-hop cultures informed various realms of visual culture and its study?   

Fall 2011

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Jim Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA

Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 516: Analysis of 20th Century Music (1945-present) , Jay Reise
Wednesday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Music building room 210

Analysis of 20th & 21st Century Music beginning with its roots in the 3 Viennese, Bartok, & Stravinsky and then continuing with Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Penderecki, Zimmermann and ending with special emphasis on music from 1990-2011.

Music 603: Aesthetics and Criticism, Carolyn Abbate
Friday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar room, VPL

The seminar will be centered on Wagner's *Tristan und Isolde* 1857-2011. We will read Gottfried's *Tristan* poem and Wagner's libretto drafts, and dip into the genesis of the opera. The seminar will focus both on history and aesthetics: for example, why music theory adores *Tristan*; Wagnerisme; issues of performance and unperformability; *Tristan* in film music and film; *Tristan* and postmodern theater. Anyone planning to participate in the seminar should get in touch with me for information on buying books/scores in advance of the first meeting.

Music 700: Seminar in Composition, Anna Weesner
Thursday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Music building room 210

Music 700 this fall will involve an in-depth study of the music of Witold Lutoslawski. Work for the course be analytical and compositional.

Music 705: Theorizing the Caribbean, Tim Rommen
Monday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

This semester we will explore the historical and contemporary shapes of critical and social theory within the Caribbean. We will do so with specific reference to the ways that Caribbean intellectuals, musicians, and performance practices have traveled and continue to move through and impact the economic, political, geographic, and cultural spaces of the region. Our explorations will be framed by readings that illustrate not only the abiding issues that have confronted Caribbean societies throughout the years, but also the changing terrain upon which solutions to those issues have been sought and articulated. Along the way, we will consider themes such as: history and memory; violence, colonialism, and neocolonialism; and cartographies, poetics, and flows. As such, we will have occasion to read the work of a wide range of scholars, including, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Edouard Glissant, Fernando Ortiz, Belinda Edmondson, Derek Walcott, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, C.L.R. James, Martin Munro, and Franz Fanon, among many others. Ultimately, these journeys will provide a framework within which to consider our own research and thought. While the course readings will be centered on Caribbean contexts, your final papers will afford you the opportunity to pursue the themes of the course with reference to your own interests and scholarly work.

Music 750: Chopin and the History of Time, Jeffrey Kallberg
Wednesday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

The seminar will explore manipulations of time (including, but not limited to fermatas, tenutos, grand pauses) in music from the first half of the nineteenth century, with particular attention to Chopin. Readings will vary from detailed investigations of particular musical repertories and passages to larger-scale explorations of apparent changes in conceptions of time in this area (history of geography, concepts of time at the onset of international modes of communication like the telegraph, etc.).

Music 780: Seminar in Theory: Rancière, Jairo Moreno
Tuesday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m., Music building room 210

Jacques Rancière’s notions of the “distribution of the sensible,” “the aesthetics of politics,” and ”regimes of arts,” along with his axiomatic positing of equality as the basis of all politics, continue to gain relevance to fields addressing the intersection of sense-perception, politics, and claims to intelligibility. Music studies, where recent efforts have been directed to refuse the logos in the name of an ethical, albeit moralizing, turn, might find in Rancière a sobering reminder that art is radically limited precisely because it is so fundamentally open. The seminar overviews his work: the early archival study of C. 19 worker’s aesthetic experiments and emancipatory pedagogy, his critique of political philosophy, and his turn towards aesthetics. As way of introduction to a number of these issues, we will read and/or consider authors he addresses, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schiller, Marx, Althusser, Lyotard, Benjamin, Adorno, Bourdieu, and Badiou.

Spring 2011

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Jim Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA

Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 515: 20th Century Analysis II, Jay Reise
Thursday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m

Analytical Studies of 20th century music focusing on post World War II music.

Music 530: Composition with Electronic Media, Jim Primosch
Tuesday, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

The course will focus on students' compositional projects. Short studies working with particular hardware and software will be assigned, but student-initiated projects will predominate. Recent and historical examples from the literature will be considered and discussed.

Music 621: The Senses: Theories, Practices, and Politics, Jairo Moreno
Tuesday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

We will study the senses in historical, anthropological, and philosophical perspectives, with particular emphasis on the relation of these perspectives to the development of aurality in modernity (and beyond) and the recent so-called auditory turn. Topics include: senses and sense classification; the location of the senses in competing ideas of knowledge production; regimes of the sensorial in their relation to notions of social and cultural difference; synaesthesia. Readings from anthropology; sound studies; music studies (ethnomusicology and musicology); philosophy.

Music 705: Seminar in Ethnomusicology, Carol Muller
Thursday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

This semester focuses on the subject of the African diasporas, old and new. We will read materials on music and freedom, improvisation/spontaneity, exile, trauma, memory, home, as they relate to the larger ideas of contemporary African diaspora. And we will listen as we proceed.

Music 740: Studies in 18th Century Music, Emily Dolan
Wednseday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

This course will explore the twelve symphonies Haydn composed during his twotrips to London in the 1790s. Celebrated and widely imitated, these symphonies were the last Haydn wrote?though he went on to compose a number of large-scale orchestral works, including masses and his two oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons. We will delve into a wide variety of themes and approaches to these works: ideas of naturalness, folk song, and ?Der Schein des Bekanntes,? metaphors of machines, the history of aesthetics, issues of
formal analysis, the history of orchestration, and eighteenth-century notions of humor and wit.

Music 760: Studies in 20th Century Music, Simon Morrison (Visiting Professor from Princeton University)
Friday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

This seminar concerns the relationships and non-relationships between music and dance in works from c. 1890-c. 1945, as well as much more recent works conceived by the choreographers George Balanchine and Mark Morris. The focus of the course, broadly speaking, it to challenge existing conceptions about Modernism by exploring lesser-known repertoire, analyzing the manner in which leading composers and choreographers of the period have been constructed by historians, and assessing their works on their own terms. The seminar will involve concentrated listening and viewing (in certain instances using archival footage), analytical and interpretive work, and critical reading.

Besides active seminar participation, formal requirements include written responses to the listening/viewing assignments, music and dance analyses, and a final research paper.

Fall 2010

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Jim Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA

Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 525: Composition Selected Forms, Anna Weesner
Thursday 2-5 p.m., Music bldg., room 210.

The character piece and the miniature: Chopin, Currier, Kurtag, Schumann, Weir. We will pursue the intersection of musical character and form. We will study short pieces and consider how groups of them add up, accumulating meaning as part of longer spans. We will also take up the notion of "common currency" in musical langauge. The work of the course will involve small-scale composition exercises and projects as well as music analysis.

Music 605: Anthropology of Music, Tim Rommen
Thursday 2-5 p.m., Seminar room, Van Pelt Library

Music 700: 20/21 Century Music as Heard From the Piano Bench, Jim Primosch
Tuesday 2-5 p.m., Music bldg., room 210.

This course will survey highlights in the piano repertoire from Debussy to the present. Students will analyze selected works, including customary concerns with pitch, rhythm and form, but also considering how the music is constructed specifically as piano music.   Issues will include the physicality of pianistic technique, the search  
for new pianistic resources and the renewal of old ones, and how works are "orchestrated" for the piano. Student will compose one or more   short works for the piano. Repertoire to be studied may include music  
by Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Copland, Ives, Carter, Messiaen, Berio, Boulez, Ligeti, Bolcom, Corigliano, Cage, Cowell, Stockhausen, Rzewski, Martino, Babbitt, Wuorinen, Crumb,  
and others. Significant jazz pianists (Tatum, Waller, Monk, Wilson, Powell, Evans, etc., as well as contemporary practitioners) will also be considered.

It is requested that students planning to take the course should use the summer to, insofar as is possible, fill in any gaps they may have in their familiarity with important pre-twentieth century piano repertoire. The repertoire list for the composition listening exam can provide a starting point; further suggestions available upon request.

Music 710: Studies in medieval Music, Emma Dillon
Wednesday 2-5 p.m., Seminar Room, Van Pelt Library.

This course will explore the culture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French song through the lens of one of the most famous witnesses to medieval music-making: the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds fr. 146 (often known as a the Roman de Fauvel). Created in Paris around 1317 to mark the accession of a new king, Philip V, the book was a response to the turbulent politics of its environment. The years leading up to Philip’s coronation had been marred by corruption in the royal realm, while a string of natural disasters, from famine to bitterly cold winters, led some to characterize this time as prelude to the Apocalypse. To honor or perhaps even to admonish the new king, clerics who served in the royal chancery voiced their hopes and fears for the future through music, poetry, and images, collaborating in a confection of these elements to make a work of unprecedented originality. The manuscript brings together political poems, a chronicle, a chansonnier-like song collection, and, most famously, a reworked version of the Old French satire of the Roman de Fauvel. Together, like the voices of a motet, the different components offer complaint about the past, and a stern exemplum for the new king.

The manuscript is best known to musicology for its version of the Roman de Fauvel. The text in fr. 146 is a reworked version of an earlier roman by a chancery clerk, Gervais du Bus, the reworkings attributed in a rubric to one Chaillou de Pesstain. In a thinly-veiled attack of the corruption in the royal house, Gervais’s original story recounted the tale of a horse, Fauvel. Fauvel is no ordinary horse: his very name embodies his evil nature, with each letter standing for a different vice, Flatterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Variete, Envie and Lachte; while his colour, fauve, a kind of murky brown, was the symbol of hypocrisy. The story traces how the Goddess Fortuna raised him from his stinking stable to rule as king of France. Anxious to maintain his status, Fauvel embarks on a campaign to woo and wed Fortuna, and thereby ensure his eternal good fortune. Outraged, the Goddess rejects him, but as a consolation prize offers him her hench-woman Vain Glory as a bride; and so the story ends in gloom, as Fauvel and his offspring, the Fauveline, rampage through France. In the 1317 version, the makers took the story up, and renewed it and updated it for our manuscript. They expanded the narrative with new literary interpolations, and laced the whole tale with luscious sequences of images. Most radically, though, they cast into the fabric of the text over 169 musical items, ranging from ancient chant, to thirteenth-century conductus, to state of the art Ars Nova motets. In some cases, pieces were reworked to align with the new context, while in others, new music was written expressly for the book. Together music, image, and text work intertwine on the stage of the parchment to perform the political message.

The Fauvel manuscript is thus in one sense a spectacular act of mediation: of literary and musical traditions, and of political events in France’s recent past. Our course will use the manuscript as a window through which to explore the wider traditions of song and literature of the preceding century, and as a key witness to the compositional and notational agendas of the Ars Nova. At the same time, we will explore how the makers of Fauvel were challenged and inspired by the medium of the book: how did the manuscript surfaces – the folio, the compilation – determine the meaning the texts (musical, literary, pictorial)? Can music express ‘silent’ meaning, through its disposition on the page, or through its notational language? What choices were made in adapting pre-existent music to its new literary and visual setting? Who made those choices, and where were the creative boundaries between musical composition, adaptation, and inscription? How do these multiple levels of creativity inform notions of authority and authorship? To provide answers, students will necessarily come to know the book from the inside out, and as well as intensive familiarization with the musical repertory of the manuscript, will also learn how the book was made. Finally, we will examine the specific cultural conditions that produced the book, from the practical skills and expertise needed to make a book of this kind; to the evidence of musical sources in Paris c. 1317 from which the older repertories in the manuscript were made available; to the fraught political situation of the Capetian royal household, accessible through contemporary archival records; and finally, to the intricate workings of the royal chancery which was host to the poets and musicians who made the book.

This course does not require prior knowledge of the medieval song repertory. Rather, it is designed for students with diverse musical background and/or training in medieval studies outside musicology. It aims to leave students with a deep knowledge of the content and contexts for the Fauvel manuscript; to develop a familiarity with medieval repertories and secondary literature to facilitate teaching or future research in medieval music; and finally, to encourage students to explore ways that the broad methodological and thematic issues relevant to Fauvel may be fruitfully transferred and adapted to their own specific research interests.

Music 780: Seminar in Theory: Modern Music Theory as Aurality, Jairo Moreno
Tuesday 2-5 p.m., Seminar room, Van Pelt Library

Using the corpus of theoretical writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau as a historical axis, the seminar will explore formations and transformations of musical listening vis-à-vis his contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. A central concern will be the elaboration of cognitive and affective networks across hearing, listening, and musical and sonic materiality, a general field we shall term ‘aurality.’ Texts include primary sources – theoretical treatises (Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, Diderot, Rousseau, C.P.E. Bach, Kirnberger, G. Weber, Sechter, Hauptmann, and Riemann) and selected philosophical writings (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel), as well as contemporary commentaries and critiques (Collins Judd, McClary, Christensen, Hyer, Rehding, Schneider, Moreno, among others).

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Spring 2010

Music 505: Chromatic-Harmony, Jay Reise
Tuesday, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Analytical Studies in Harmony.

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Brad Smith
Day/Time/Location TBA

Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 520: Orchestration, Jim Primosch
Thursday, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

A study of the instruments of the orchestra and their combination. Frequent
written projects.

Music 604: Historiography, Jeffrey Kallberg
Thursday, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

This course will examine the roles of biography in music-historical study, with special emphasis on the biography of Chopin.

Music 705: Seminar in Ethnomusicology, Carol Muller
Tuesday, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

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.

Music 730: Studies in Baroque, Michael Marrison (Visiting Professor from Swarthmore College)
Mondays, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Religious Meaning in Handel and Bach

This seminar will focus on the import of the musical settings in Handel's Messiah and in Bach's Passions and church cantatas, particularly on questions of religious polemic (against Judaism, Islam, and Roman Catholicism). Religious meaning in secular, so-called purely instrumental music will also be considered (e.g., Bach's Musical Offering).

Music 770: Afro American Music, Guthrie Ramsey
Wednesdays, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

FROM THE BLUES TO OBAMA: HISTORY, CULTURE, AND POWER IN BLACK CHICAGO
This course is an historical and thematic survey of expressive culture, institutions, and historiographies of black Chicago from the late 19th century to the present.  Beginning with the formation of African American communities in the “Windy City,” the topics will range over numerous expressive practices (music, visual art, film, photography, and dance); literature (journalism, poetry, novels); politics, religion, and important institutions.   Together with these numerous sites of investigation, we will focus on how musical practice has mediated, and in many cases, transformed issues of modernity and group identity.

Permission to register required by instructor.

Music 780: Seminar in Theory, Eugene Narmour
Fridays, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

This seminar will investigate modes of performing and interpretations of score through analysis and discussions of forms, functions, parameters, text settings, scientific studies of performance, and so forth.  Readings will be
based on two of the instructor’s current manuscripts--Psychological Principles for Performing Music and Musical Scores and the Seven Modes of Performance.

Fall 2009

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, James Primosch

Day/Time/Location TBA
Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 608: Writing About Music, Guthrie Ramsey/Tim Rommen
Thursday, 2 to 5 p.m., VPL

This course is an introduction to research methods and musical scholarship and it places emphasis on the broad interests fostered and methodological approaches adopted by the faculty here at Penn. We will read widely, exploring questions of historiography, fieldwork, musical analysis, archival research, transcription, and critical theory. In so doing, we will approach at a closer range the broad areas of overlap between disciplinary approaches as well as the specific methodological tools that each disciplinary approach has found particularly useful. All of our inquiries will be conducted with the aim of developing a sense of what it might mean to write about music and we afford you opportunities to write at various moments throughout the semester.

Music 650: Field Methods in Ethnomusicology, Tim Rommen
Wednesday, 2 to 5 p.m., VPL

This course explores various methodological problems and theoretical constructs that confront us during the course of ethnomusicological fieldwork. How can we approach writing about our ethnographic work without silencing the voices of those who should be heard? In what ways might transcription and notation complicate power structures and reinforce our own musical values? What special challenges need to be negotiated in the process of documenting ethnographies on film? How do ethical and economic dilemmas inform our approach to making sound recordings? A series of readings in ethnomusicology and anthropology will suggest some answers to these questions—answers that will, in turn, be tested by means of several interconnected fieldwork projects focused on gospel music in West Philadelphia. Our readings and fieldwork experiences will shape our classroom discussions, leading not only to a better understanding of ethnomusicological methods, but also to a deeper appreciation of the “shadows” that we cast in the field. During the first few weeks of the semester, classes will follow a lecture and discussion format. These discussions will necessarily take as their point of departure the listed readings for the week. By week four, we will begin exploring research and representational methodologies ranging from photographic essays to interviews, from video and audio recordings to ethnographic writing. You will apply these methodologies in the field and, in so doing, explore not only the technical but also the interpersonal skills required for successful fieldwork and, by extension, for sustainable community partnerships. By the end of the semester, each of you will have contributed a significant body of fieldwork to a collaborative research project culminating in the production of a documentary film.

Music 700, Seminar in Composition, Jay Reise
Tuesday, 2 to 5 p.m., Fisher Bennett, Room 407

Rhythm. In this course we will focus on the construction and development of rhythmic motives. Among the techniques discussed will be phrase construction, rhythmic counterpoint, ornamentation, and the effect of of rhythm on the development of surrounding detail. Assignments will include composing weekly short pieces utilizing these techniques.

Music 720, Renaissance Music, Richard Freedman (Visiting Professor from Haverford)
Friday , 2 to 5 p.m., VPL

The remarkable music and equally remarkable career of Orlando di Lasso will be our point of entry into the musical world of the sixteenth century. Born in Mons (in what is now Belgium) in the early 1530’s, already as a choirboy he traveled to Naples and Mantua. By his early 20’s he was master at the church of the Lateran in Rome. Between 1564 and his death some thirty years later he served as musical director of the Bavarian court in Munich. His music was known and much admired across musical Europe, from Venice to London and from Paris to Nuremberg. He was, in the words of French poet Pierre de Ronsard, the “more than divine Orlando.”

Composer of over thirteen-hundred works in every imaginable genre (and just about every imaginable European language), Lasso cultivated an acute awareness of the importance of the relatively new medium of print and its power to secure the relationship between text and tone in enduring ways. He collaborated closely with a long string of prominent music printers in Antwerp, Paris, Munich, and Venice. He was, in fact, the first composer ever (starting in the 1570’s) to have intellectual property rights over his works.

How might Lasso have understood his craft? How did listeners of the sixteenth century respond to his music? How did the printed page shape their encounter with his art?

Music 750, Film Music, Carolyn Abbate
Tuesday, 2 to 5 p.m., VPL

Course description: To be announced

Spring 2009

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, Anna Weesner

Day/Time/Location TBA
Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:

-sight singing (including C clefs)

-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations

-accurate performance of rhythms

-general keyboard skills

-score reading at the keyboard

Music 516: Analysis of 20th Century Music, Jay Reise
Wednesday, 2:00-5:00 p.m. FB407

Description: Analysis, discussion, techniques and aesthetics of 20th-21st
Century Music from 1945. Messiaen, Boulez Stockhausen, Penderecki, Zimmermann,
Rochberg and others, ending with special emphasis on music from 1990-2008.

Music 530: Electronic Music, Jim Primosch
Thursday, 2:00-5:00 p.m., FB 407
Introduction to techniques of electronic composition.

Music 605: Anthropology of Music, Carol Muller
R 2:00-5:00 p.m. Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Worlds of Music/Music Worlds
This seminar will require in-depth reading, listening, and writing about a group
of musical cultures often included in teaching about "World Music."  In other
words, this seminar will require students to read a monograph a week, listen
closely to related music, and write responsively to this material.  We begin
with thinking about the musical "exotic" and move onto a series of musical
cultures from a wide range of places.  The seminar will end with a discussion
of the larger music, intellectual, and methodological issues and challenges to
thinking about worlds of music/music worlds as a comparative project.  Those
who imagine they will have to teach a course on "World Music and Cultures" at
the undergraduate or graduate level, either sooner or later, will benefit from
this class.

Music 620: Tonal Analysis, Ingrid Arauco (Haverford College)
F 2:00-5:00 p.m., FB 407

Course Description: Techniques of analysis applied to music of the eighteenth, nineteenth,
and early twentieth centuries.  Topics to be covered include the nature and aims of musical analysis,
chromatic harmony and the limitations of Roman-numeral labeling, and forms in various style periods.
This course will not entail a comprehensive study of a single method or analytic viewpoint, but rather
draw selectively from a range of ideas and techniques.

Music 750: Studies in 19th Century Music [French Opéra Comique and Operetta 1860-1933], Carolyn Abbate
M 2:00-5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Course Description: This seminar covers the history of French “dialogue opera” genres from the second
empire to the 1930s.  We will look both at stage works, and film operettas.  Topics to be considered
include the aesthetics of frivolity, the social function of operetta, musical parody and its registers,
the anti-Wagnerian movement in France and Germany, and the relationship between
French Trivialmusik and the cultural formation of Weimar-era Berlin.

Music 770: Studies in American Music, Guthrie Ramsey
W 2:00-5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Course Description: 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 Smithsonian
Institution; (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, which includes: 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 will be the origin and development of American popular music, the gendered and racial aspects of American classical music, and American music
historiography.

Music 780: Seminar in Theory [Musical Repetition], Mark Butler
T 2:00-5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Course Description: This seminar will explore the implications and possibilities of  
repetition in music, viewed through the lenses of theory, analysis,  and other intellectual traditions. Listening and analysis will be drawn from a wide variety of styles.

Fall 2008

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, James Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA
Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:
-sight singing (including C clefs)
-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations
-accurate performance of rhythms
-general keyboard skills
-score reading at the keyboard

Music 608: Graduate Core Course: Writing about Music, Carolyn Abbate and Emily Dolan
Tuesday/thursday 2-5 p.m., Marian Anderson Seminar Room, Van Pelt Library
Course description: Writing about music is team-taught course, designed to introduce first year
graduates to a broad spectrum of ideas and approaches to music, and to develop their skills for writing about music. This course is not about establishing fixed models and methodologies; nor does it set out to debate disciplinarity, or to give students full coverage of any one field. Rather, itwill examine
music in its fullest definition (as sound, text, memory, belief and so on), selecting materials from the broadest possible temporal and geographicarange. There will be the chance to work both in depth on materials with individual professors, and also collaboratively and comparatively during sessions in which faculty teach
side-by-side. As well as helping students to develop new skills (archival, analytical, critical), and to engage with musical traditions and materials foreign to them until now, this course also encourages students to experiment
with new approaches to their own fields of interest. The class will meet twice per week for two hours each time. There will be a substantial written component, with four written assignments during the semester in addition to a
llonger project.

Music 700: Seminar in Composition, Anna Weesner
Monday, 2-5 p.m., Fisher Bennet Hall, room 407
Seminar on self-referential narrative in music; compositional and analytical projects.

Music 705: Seminar in Ethnomusicology, Tim Rommen
Friday, 2-5 p.m, Fisher Bennet Hall, room 407
Course Description:This semester we will explore by way of a series of journeys the historical and contemporary shapes of tourism within the Caribbean with specific reference to the ways that musicians and performance practices have travelled and continue to move through the economic, political, geographic, and cultural spaces of consumption. These journeys will be framed by matched sets of readings that illustrate not only the abiding issues that have confronted Caribbean societies throughout the years, but also the changing terrain upon which solutions to those issues have been sought and articulated. We will be travelling along routes that variously explore travel writing, literature, folklore, travel and mobility theory, and ethnographic monographs, all with a view toward helping us think through the issues at hand. Although we will be spending a good portion of our time thinking about the Bahamas, we will also take time to consider music and tourism in places like Carriacou, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Ultimately, these journeys will provide a framework within which to consider our own work. While the course readings will be centered on Caribbean contexts, your final papers should address tourism and travel in ways that inform your own interests and scholarly work.

Music 710: Seminar in Medieval Studies, Emma Dillon
Monday, 2-5 p.m., Marian Anderson Seminar room, Van Pelt Library
Course Description: To Be announced

Music 720: Seminar in Renaissance Music, Gary Tomlinson
Wednesday, 2-5 p.m., Marian Anderson Seminar room, Van Pelt Library
Toward a Biocultural Musicology

It is fair to say that most musicological and ethnomusicological studies over the last fifty years have been instances of local studies, aiming to understand the workings of particular social and cultural practices of music, of particular societies and their musics, or of specific musical genres, styles, and repertories themselves. This has been as true of studies embedded in elaborated non-musical contexts (i.e., studies in ethnomusicology and contextual music history) as of internalist studies of music (e.g., repertorial studies and analysis). To be sure, some of the most wide-ranging of these studies have aimed to generalize out from the local in order to form broader conclusions about music and music-making; but few—with the exception of studies of music cognition—have taken as their aim the understanding of the most basic human commonalities in musical practices and the underlying conditions of these shared features.

This situation has changed over the last decade or so with the development of new studies in the evolutionary psychology and physiology of music, with the tentative broaching of a sweeping neocomparativist musicology, and with the continued elaboration of music cognition studies. The time is now ripe to ask how these general studies might be linked to the results of the local studies that have been the métier of musicology and ethnomusicology alike. This seminar will set out to provide some preliminary answers to this question. It will bring together readings both musicological and extra-musicological, attempting to relate broad findings concerning musical cognition and embodiment to case studies of musical practice. It will range across the subdisciplines of music theory, ethnomusicology, and historical musicology with an eye to sketching the outlines of a global history of human music-making that might highlight the universal conditions for and features of the myriad traditions it embraces. It will take up such broad issues as the changing relations of music and technology (including writing); the ubiquitous connections of music and metaphysics (spirituality, religion, etc.); combinatoriality and emergent complexity in music, language, writing, and other human phenomena; semiotic (or representational) vs. information-processing views of music; even questions of musical cognition beyond Homo sapiens.

While participating in the general discussion across the semester, students will be searching out specific research topics of their own, topics relating the seminar conversation back toward the subdisciplines in which they aim to specialize. (Finally, in case it is not yet obvious, note that the seminar will not aim in any direct way to fulfill the title of the rubric under which it appears, “Studies in Renaissance Music.”)

Spring 2008

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, James Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA
Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:
-sight singing (including C clefs)
-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations
-accurate performance of rhythms
-general keyboard skills
-score reading at the keyboard

Music 516: Analysis of Post-1950 20th Century Music, Anna Weesner
Tuesday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.,Room 208
Analytical Studies of 20th century music focusing on post World War II music.

Music 525: Composition Selected Forms, Jay Reise
Thursday, 2:00-5:00 p.m., Room 208
Study of the style and form of one genre, composer, or historical period, with
emphasis on written projects.

Music 609: Introduction to Music (Part II--Core Course), Butler/Ramsey
Wednesday/Thursday 2:00-5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar room VPL
To be announced

Music 650/250: Field Methods in Ethnomusicology, Carol Muller
T 2:00-5:00 p.m.
The goal of the seminar is to give students a compressed dissertation research
experience--taking them from the beginnings of "researching" a community and
its music, through the documentation and representation stages.  Students do
background and methods reading, though the focus of the class is the
development of basic ethnographic and documentation skills.  This is a
community partnership seminar, which means that all forms of representation are
produced in collaboration with community partners in West Philadelphia.  These
include photographic essays, an NPR style audio documentary, but most
significantly, twenty-thirty minute documentary films on a particular subject.
See sample syllabus and projects on
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/music/westphillymusic

Music 710/COMP638/FREN 638 401, Etymologies of Medeival Song, Dillon/Brownlee
M 2:00-5:00 p.m.

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 late thirteenth 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 Machaut manuscripts.

The course is organized around four key themes, running roughly chronologically, and framing four models by which medieval poets and composers defined song. We will each lead one seminar around a given theme, with the idea of giving you two different takes on a topic. Readings will be geared towards a rich range of primary materials – literary, musical, theoretical, manuscripts ad so on. In addition, musically orientated weeks will include close readings of specific songs, hopefully with live performance. We will also assign a small selection of secondary readings each week, along with a fuller bibliography of recommended (but not mandatory) reading. These are intended to offer students fresh to either discipline some sense of the concerns and themes that shape our respective approaches to song. We will top and tail the semester with two jointly taught classes, intended to serve as workshops in what a collaborative engagement with song may look like.

Course evaluation

We hope that our collaboration will encourage students to approach song from the dual disciplinary perspectives set out this semester, and to engage with song in as holistic a manner as possible. With this in mind, we will devote the final three classes to student presentations in a workshop format. At the heart of your presentation will be a close literary and musical engagement with a song or group of songs. Your presentation will form the basis for a longer final paper, worth 75% of the final grade. In addition, there will be smaller assignments throughout the semester worth 25%.

Music 750/STSC 418: Studies in Romantic Music, Emily Dolan/John Tresch
F 2:00-5:00 p.m.
The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the invention of many new instruments
in both music and science. They were sometimes made by the same people, and they
were often understood to have the same purpose: to attune individuals to the
rhythms, proportions, and harmonies of nature. This seminar draws connections
between music, science, politics, ethics and aesthetics between 1750 and 1850,
a crucial point in European history. We will examine the role of instruments in
conceptions of nature, society, and the individual, traversing the clockwork
regularity of the Enlightenment, the turbulent longings of Romanticism, and the
spooky delirium of the fantastic. The course begins with light refracting
through prisms; it ends with the blaring trombones of Berlioz’s opium-induced
Symphonie Fantastique; along the way we will visit ideas of mimesis, mechanical
observation, theories of the passions, global science, demonic virtuosity,
phantasmagoria, the uncanny, and the paradoxes of bourgeois selfhood. Through
working with actual instruments and reading primary texts, students will be
invited to question received notions in intellectual history. The class is open
to creative undergraduates and graduates from any field who want to explore a
range of ideas of what it means to be human in the modern world.

Spring 2006

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, James Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA
Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:
-sight singing (including C clefs)
-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations
-accurate performance of rhythms
-general keyboard skills
-score reading at the keyboard

Music 516: Analysis of Post-1950 20th Century Music, Jay Reise
Tuesday 2-5PM, Bennett Hall Room 407
Post-1950 20th-21st Century Music including aesthetic discussion and analysis of Stravinsky, Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Penderecki, Zimmermann, American composers, and works composed 1990 - 2005.

Music 604: Historiography, Gary Tomlinson
Tuesday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library, Marian Anderson Seminar Room
Theories and models of historical investigation. Analysis of both historiographic writings and musicological works exemplifying particular approaches.

Music 620: Analytical Methods: Tonal Music, Mark Butler
Monday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library, Marian Anderson Seminar Room
Current methods in the analysis of tonal music.
To prepare for first class on January 9h, please do the following:
1. Read Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis, pp. 16-26.
2. Read William Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music, pp. 1-32 and 68-91.
3. Analyze the first movement of Mozart's Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 332.
Provide a complete harmonic analysis and detailed labels for the parts of the sonata form. Diagram the phrase structure of mm. 1-22 and 41-56, and be prepared to discuss the phrase structure of any other part of the piece. Turn all this in on a neatly marked-up copy of the score, and bring another copy of the score with your analysis to class for discussion.
The two readings are on Blackboard and on reserve in the library (You will have to register for the course before you can access the Blackboard site). If you don't have access to a copy of the Mozart, it should be readily
available through online sheet music sites.
The analysis will not be for a letter grade, but please do your best; I want to see where you are coming into the course. We will move on to more advanced analytical approaches and concerns shortly after this class.

Music 650: Field Methods in Ethnomusicology, Carol Muller
Wednesday 2-5PM, Bennett Hall Room 407
This course explores various methodological problems and theoretical constructs that confront us during the course of ethnomusicological fieldwork. How can we approach writing about our ethnographic work without silencing the voices of those who should be heard?  In what ways might transcription and notation complicate power structures and reinforce our own musical values? What special challenges need to be negotiated in the process of documenting ethnographies on film?  How do ethical and economic dilemmas inform our approach to making sound recording?  A series of readings in ethnomusicology and anthropology will suggest some answers to these questions--answers that will, in turn, be tested by means of several interconnected fieldwork projects focused on gospel music in West Philadelphia.  Our readings and fieldwork experiences will shape our classroom discussions, leading not only to be a better understanding of ethnomusicological methods, but also to a deeper appreciation of the "shadows" that we cast in the field.

Music 654: Early Modern Seminar: Novelties and the Novel (1680-1730), Joan DeJean (Romance Languages) and Bethany Wiggin (Romance Languages)
Cross Listed with ENGL 730, FREN 654, GRMN 665
Tuesday 2-4PM, Williams Hall Room 304
At the turn of the eighteenth century, the novel established itself throughout Europe as the pre-eminent literary genre. It was seen above all as a radically new literary form, a novelty. At the same time as the novel was becoming prominent, many other kinds of novelties such as coffee and chocolate first became part of the European landscape. At the same moment the fashion industry was born when high fashion was first marketed to a broad public. And perhaps the ultimate novelty in this story was the novel’s gender bias: it was the only form in literary history to have been produced massively by women.
This seminar will explore the ways in which histories of the novel and of contemporary novelties such as coffee and high fashion were intertwined. We will pay particular attention to another contemporary genre, the newspaper, whose rise in the early modern period was essential to the marketing of novelties. We will also focus on the process of translation by means of which the novel spread rapidly through England, France, and Germany.
Among the novels we will discuss: Robinson Crusoe and The Princesse de Clèves, the two “founding” texts of the modern novel. Other texts may include: fairy tales, d’Aulnoy’s travel novels, Manon Lescaut, Thousand and One Nights. Among the subjects to be considered: fashion prints, advertising and broadsheets, journals and book reviews, treatises on coffee, travel narratives, musical novelties (such as vaudevilles and early opera), letter-writing guides, and dictionaries and language manuals.
All works to be discussed will be available in English, French, and German, in the original text and in translations from the early modern period.
We will also maintain a focus on research methods. The seminar will be held on the 6 th floor of Van Pelt so that we can have access every week to materials from Penn’s rare book collection.

Music 700: Seminar in Composition, Eric Moe, Visiting Professor from University of Pittsburgh
Monday 2-5PM, Bennett Hall Room 407
Seminar on self-referential narrative in music; compositional and analytical projects.

Music 710: Studies in Medieval Music, Emma Dillon
Thursday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library, Marian Anderson Seminar Room
This course explores the variety of modes for writing about music and musical experience in the Middle Ages, from both the modern and medieval perspective. Aimed at introducing students to key research in the field of medieval musicology, and to a wide range of primary evidence (notated, theoretical, literary and visual) relating to medieval music, the course focuses attention on the problems and questions we encounter when trying to write about medieval music, and, no less important, what it meant to write about music and musical experience in the Middle Ages. What were the theoretical and theological frameworks in which medievals placed sacred musical experience? Conversely, how did they legitimize secular musical cultures outside the framework of the sacred? How were musical traditions established, and what did a ‘history’ of music signify in the medieval period? How, more fundamentally, was musical sound distinguished from other sorts of sounds? What was the effect of music, and how did medievals both represent and make sense of music’s ineffable, sensual powers? In turn, what are the critical, analytical, theoretical and philological skills we need today to make sense of the musical objects of the medieval past? These are some of the questions we will address throughout the semester. Using the double vision of primary and secondary materials, the course aims, above all, to give students a ‘hands-on’ experience of medieval musical culture, and to encourage students to develop their own writerly voices.
The course will focus on key repertories including early chant and polyphony; troubadour and trouvère song, and the songs of the interpolated romance tradition; and music in Trecento Italy. We will also explore a repertory of song for which there is – never was – any notated evidence: namely, the vast repertory of imaginary music, from the music of the spheres, to the songs sung by angels in Paradise. Investigation of the notated presence of these repertories will be complemented by exploration of a range of written – and occasionally, visual – responses to them. These will include theoretical responses including Boethius, John the Deacon, Guido, Notker, John of Garland and others; Latin writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux, John of Salisbury, Hugh of St. Victor; and in vernacular literary contexts including the anonymous razos and vidas supplementing the troubadour cansos, writings of Dante, Machaut and others. Recent scholarship will include work by medievalists and musicologists such as Leo Treitler, Ardis Butterfield, Anna Maria Busse Berger, Simon Gaunt, Sarah Kay, Caroline Bynum, Bruce Holsinger, Rachel Fulton, Karl Morrison, and many others.
For those new to medieval music, this course will serve as a thorough introduction to the field, and will offer coverage of some of the main repertories, manuscripts and primary written sources of the European tradition. For those already experienced in medieval studies, the course will serve to complement existing expertise with exposure to a range of primary sources relating to music. While students will be expected to write throughout the semester, there will be considerable flexibility in the written assignments, which will be designed to allow students both to experiment with new modes of writing, and to refine and develop established research and writing interests.

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