Music Program Classes
Classes offered at the Graduate Center
in SPRING 2007
Click here for Fall 2006
classes; click here for
registration times.
76700 Proseminar: Teaching Music
Prof. Kramer
Tuesday, 5:15 - 7:15. Room 3491.
An exploration of teaching strategies and a discussion of prominent pedagogical issues across the range of disciplinary areas in Music, including Ethnomusicology, with special emphasis on teaching the music of the United States; Theory and Composition; Musicology, with two sessions given to the teaching of Music Appreciation; and Performance. A final meeting will offer instruction on the use of computers in the classroom. Faculty from respective areas will conduct each session, joined by current and recent teaching fellows who have taught in the CUNY system. Students are expected to attend all meetings, and will be asked to make at least one formal presentation (roughly twenty minutes) in a mock-classroom environment. No written work will be required.
First-year Chancellor’s Fellows are required to register for this course or for Music Theory Pedagogy (MUS 84000). All students in Music are welcome to register, up to the cap of twenty students.
81001 Studio Tutorial (Room and Campus
TBA) Staff 3 cr.
81002 Studio Tutorial (Room and Campus TBA)
Staff 3 cr.
81003 Studio Tutorial (Room and Campus TBA)
Staff 3 cr.
81004 Studio Tutorial (Room and Campus TBA)
Staff 3 cr.
81101 Ensemble (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
1 cr.
81102 Ensemble (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
1 cr.
81103 Ensemble (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
1 cr.
81104 Ensemble (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
1 cr.
81502 Performance Practice: Baroque
Prof. Erickson.
Tuesday, 2-5pm. Room 3491.
This course, intended for performers, will
approach various issues in Baroque performance
practice primarily through the music of J. S. Bach.
Issues to be dealt with include: Baroque instruments
and vocal and instrumental technique, dances and
dance music, national styles, ornamentation, and
continuo playing.
81504 Performance Practice: 20th and 21st Centuries
Prof. Peress
Thursday
10am-1pm. Room 3491.
A study of the music of Antheil, Bernstein,
Crumb, Ellington, Feldman, Gershwin, Ives, and
Stravinsky. Special emphasis will be given to
American composers whose broad range of
vernacular-inspired styles pose interpretive
challenges alongside the technical problems usually
faced by the modern performer: polyrhythms, unusual
instrumentation, layered tempi, and aleatoric
music. Students will be asked to prepare applicable
works for instrument or voice.
82502 History of Theory 2
Prof. Rothstein
Wednesday 2-5pm. Room 3491.
A study of eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century writings on music theory, with
more limited coverage of the 17th and early 20th
centuries. Where possible, we will use English
translations of primary sources. A translation
exercise involving passages in three languages
(German, French, and Italian) will be required of
Ph.D. students. A term paper, covering some aspect
of music theory between 1625 and 1925, is also
required.
84000
Seminar in Theory/Analysis:
Serial Music in
America, 1920-2007
Prof. Straus.
Tuesday, 2-5pm. Room 3389.
American composers have written twelve-tone and
serial music in profusion, not just during the
purported heyday of the style during the
1950s and 1960s, but throughout a much broader
historical period, and in a remarkable variety of
musical styles. There is no orthodoxy, but rather a
conglomeration of highly individual approaches under
a very big and elastic tent. This course will offer
a historical survey of
twelve-tone and serial music in this country. Along
the way, we will consider the theory, aesthetics,
cognition, politics, economics, and
pedagogy of serialism.
84100 Seminar in Theory/Analysis: The Beatles
Prof. Spicer
Tuesday, 10am–1pm. Room 3419.
This seminar will offer an in-depth study of
the music of the Beatles. Using Walter Everett’s
The Beatles as Musicians as our central
reference, we will trace the group’s stylistic
development, song-by-song and album-by-album, from
their earliest days as the Quarry Men through their
swansong Abbey Road. Our primary focus will
be on analyzing the substance of the recordings
themselves — that is, we will explore issues of
form, harmony and voice leading, rhythm and groove,
performance practice, text-music relations, and so
on — and yet we will also take time to consider the
profound influence that the Beatles have had, and
continue to have, in shaping not only the landscape
of pop and rock music, but our postmodern world
itself. (Enrollment limited to doctoral students in
music, or by permission of the instructor.)
85900 Seminar in Theory/Analysis: The Operas of Bartok, Berg, and Britten
Prof. Saylor
Thursday 2-5pm. Room 3491.
.86300 Seminar in Music History: Jazz Historiography
Prof. Taylor
Monday, 10am-1pm. Room 3389.
Permission of instructor required
This seminar will examine the variety
of ways jazz has been and is being studied, with
particular emphasis on work of the last two decades.
Readings will be drawn from critical literature and
oral history, as well as scholarship from
musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, art
history, and other disciplines. The course is not a
jazz history survey, though music from a variety of
periods will be examined. Rather, the seminar will
examine how tools currently available to the
scholar—from both within and without the academic
context—help understand and appreciate a living
music with a rich history and vibrant future. Final
projects will concentrate on jazz musicians
currently living and working in the Greater NYC
area. Some prior experience with jazz and/or popular
music studies is preferred. (Permission of the
Instructor is required)
86600 Seminar in Music History: Secular Song of the 14th and 15th Centuries
Profs Atlas and Stone
Tuesday, 10am-1pm. Room 3389.
86700 Seminar in Music History: Iconography: Music and Society in the 17th and 18th Centuries
Prof. Hanning
Friday 10am-1pm. Room 3491.
The course will study paintings on musical subjects, principally from the
16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and how they reveal the ways in which music as
an embodied practice, a physical activity subject to the gaze, encodes complex
and multiple levels of meaning. Topics will include emblem books as a source of
the visual vocabulary of the Baroque affections; images of 17th-century Italian
solo singing; musical themes in art of the Dutch Golden Age; representations of
music-making in the 18th-century French salon; and the relationship between
musical performance practice and the depiction of performance in art. Special
attention will be paid to the treatment in art of women musicians, both amateurs
and professionals, saints and muses.
87000 Interdisciplinary Seminar: On Late Style: An Interdisciplinary Expedition
Profs Kramer and Greetham
Wednesday 11:45 am - 1:45 pm. Room 3491.
An interdisciplinary seminar on the concept and
practice of "late" style, focusing primarily on music and literature with forays
into art history, architecture, film, theatre, psychology, and history. We take
as our starting point Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature
Against the Grain (Pantheon 2006), interrogating his key concepts:
"anachronism and anomaly," "intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved
contradiction," and lateness as a form of "exile", and exploring how such types
of "lateness" might function in a wide range of aesthetic environments. As an
initial step, we ask "What is Style," and begin by re-examining some of the
"classic" statements on style--by F. L. Lucas, Peter Gay, Meyer Shapiro, Charles
Rosen. We then ask "What is Late Style," engaging among others Adorno’s classic
statements, together with readings in Jauss, Lukacs, Lyotard and Dahlhaus.
Subsequent meetings will be clustered around these larger rubrics: The
Historical Construction of Late Style (Beethoven; Shakespeare, Goethe; the
reinvention of Bach); Perceptions of Late Style at fin-de-siècle (Thomas
Mann, Death in Venice, Visconti’s filming of it, and Britten's last
opera; Freud, Moses and Monotheism; Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde,
and, in memory of fin-de-siècle, Strauss, Capriccio and Metamorphosen);
and Confronting Lateness, exploring such topics as late Chaucer, late
Wagner, late Stravinsky, late Joyce, late Verdi, late Orson Welles, late Miles
Davis, late Matisse, late Sophocles, late Picasso, late Coltrane, late Melville,
late Dickinson, late Moore (Marianne, Henry), late Richard Wright, late T. S.
Eliot, late Langston Hughes, late Morrison, late Elliott Carter.
We invite students from any area of the Humanities and
Arts in which a creative idiolect (or "style") plays both against a cultural
context and against the creator’s own sense of "history." To further illuminate
the discussion, we have invited guests from other disciplines.
Students will be encouraged to work as much outside
their home discipline as within it, and will produce a semester paper in which
some aspect of "lateness" is explored in more than one discipline.
88400
Regional Studies in Ethnomusicology: Music, Mysticism and Ceremony in West Asia
Prof. Blum
Monday, 2-5pm. Room 3491.
The seminar is
concerned with historical and ethnographic studies
of music in relation to the beliefs and practices of
various religious orders in Iran, Kurdistan and
Turkey. The approach is comparative, with attention
to changing relationships between “Sufi” practices
and those of other religious communities (Muslim and
non-Muslim) in West Asia. The centrality of Sufi
images and values to the cultures of Persian
classical music and Ottoman music are a major
concern of the seminar. Certain practices of
neighboring regions (South Asia, Central Asia, the
Caucasus and the Levant) are also taken into
consideration. Students are asked to write three or
four short papers rather than a final term paper.
Open only to students enrolled in a doctoral
program.
89200 Composers Forum
Prof. Olan
Wednesday 5:15-7:15pm. Room 3491.
The Composers Forum features a series of lectures
by prestigious composers and scholars of 20th-century and contemporary music.
Note that the Composers Forum does not meet every Wednesday, but only on
selected dates (to be announced).
Classes of previous semesters: Fall 2006, Spring 2005,
Fall 2004, Spring 2004, Fall
2003, Spring
2003, Fall 2002,
Spring 2002, Fall
2001.
Music Programs • The Graduate Center,
CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue • New York, New York 10016-4309
(212) 817-8590 • music@gc.cuny.edu
Music Programs • The Graduate Center,
CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue • New York, New York 10016-4309
(212) 817-8590 • music@gc.cuny.edu
