Music Program Classes

Classes in other departments

The following are classes in other departments of teh Graduate Center that might be of particular interest to Music Students:

English 80200 Hotel Women: Stein, Colette, Rhys, F. Chopin & Others 
Tuesday, 6:30-8:30pm Room 3491 Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [50669] 
This seminar is the third in a series exploring intersections of literature, music, and performance (the previous two were "Ear Training" and "Minor Moderns"). In addition to writing a final essay, each student will give an in-class performance--be it recitation, drama, dance, music, or multi-media happening. We will provisionally define "hotel woman" as a fugitive sensibility or character, designated feminine, reprieved from the rigors of fixed address. The semester's authors have not always lived in hotels, but their works illustrate the ecstatic liabilities of hotel consciousness, including transience, shiftlessness, languor, depersonalization, sitting, despondency, trance, effeminacy, drift, boredom, satiety, repetition, retirement, imprisonment, hypersexuality, prostitution, shame, and addiction. We will read essays (Heidegger, Kracauer, Bachelard, Koolhaus, Benjamin) exploring the poetics of hotels, and of consciousness thrown into a hotel; we will study the work of visual artists, including the dollhouse photos of Laurie Simmons and the hotel collages of Joseph Cornell; we will read prose by Gertrude Stein, Colette, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick (Sleepless Nights), and Marie Redonnet (Hôtel Splendid), and poetry by Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire ("Hôtels"), John Ashbery (Hotel Lautréamont), and Elizabeth Bishop; and we will see a few films, perhaps Greta Garbo's Grand Hotel, Ida Lupino's Ladies in Retirement, or Little Edie Bouvier Beale's Grey Gardens. The course's musical component centers on Frédéric Chopin, and emphasizes his work's embodiment of the hermaphrodite, the has-been, the miniature, the foreigner, and the fairy. We will pay attention to the literary hauntings of Chopin's chararacteristic forms (small rooms, single-occupancy): nocturne, impromptu, waltz, mazurka, scherzo, ballade, prelude. We will read selections from Chopin's correspondence, and musicologist Jeffrey Kallberg's Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre. Additionally, in our quest to valorize the tiny, the out-of-date, and the wrong, we will listen to salon music (call it "hotel music") by such composers as Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Serge Rachmaninoff, Amy Beach, Deodat de Severac, Federico Mompou, Gabriel Fauré, and Francis Poulenc. (Footnote: the subtitle of this sometimes Francophilic course is secretly "A Theory of Pleasure.") 

Theatre 80200 Seminar in a Dramatic Genre: Critical Perspectives on the American Musical Theatre 
Monday, 4:15-6:15 pm Room TBA Prof. Savran [50038] 
This course provides an overview of the history of the most seductive of theatrical genres, the American musical, from Showboat to Rent, with critical analyses of both text and music. New scholarship-on issues such as cultural hierarchies, orientalism, gender roles, queer spectatorship, and the relation to the Hollywood musical-will be emphasized. The class will focus on the analysis of individual works that are important historically and dramatically as well as for a body of new, provocative theory they have inspired, including Showboat, Girl Crazy, Babes in Arms, Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies, Ragtime, and Rent. Although scholarship on musical theatre has long been superficial and anecdotal at best, a new generation of scholars is emerging who are transforming the field. Those whose work to be studied in depth include D.A. Miller, Gerald Mast, Andrea Most, Stacy Wolf, Lauren Berlant, Rick Altman, and Stephen Baumfield. Special attention will be paid in the class to the musical's relationship to other cultural forms (including so-called straight theatre, minstrelsy, vaudeville, jazz, and cinema), to its role in consolidating American nationalism, to its seemingly magical power to transform work into pleasure, and to its ability to illuminate the structure and function of the cultural hierarchy in the U.S.

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