Music Program Classes
Classes offered at the Graduate Center in
Spring 2009
Click here for previous semesters
MUS 76700 Proseminar in
Teaching Music
Prof. Kramer (1 credit)
Thursday, 5:30–7:30pm. 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 Americas; 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. Chancellor's Fellows will be assigned a mentor on the
campus at which they are scheduled to teach in the following fall
semester and will be expected to attend a few meetings of a class on
that campus and to make a guest presentation there. All students will be
asked to present a twenty-minute mock teaching assignment to the
proseminar. No written work will be required.
The course is required of first-year Chancellor’s
Fellows. All students in Music are welcome to register, up to the cap of
twenty students.
MUS 81504
Performance Practice of the 20th and 21st Centuries
Prof. Oppens (3 credits)
Wednesday, 10am–1pm. Room 3491.
A seminar course which will study selected works of the last
100 years through performance and analysis.
Particpants are expected to perform in a concert on May 12.
MUS 82502
Seminar in Theory/Analysis:
History of Music Theory II
Prof. Rothstein (3 credits)
Wednesday, 2–5pm. Room 3491.
A survey of Western music theory from 1600 to
1935, including extensive readings of primary and secondary sources (all
in English). A term paper is required; there is also a final exam.
Although readings are in English, students will translate short excerpts
from German, French, and Italian sources. Open to all Ph.D. students in
music; permission of instructor required for others.
MUS 83100
Seminar
in Ethnomusicology: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
Prof. Sugarman (3 credits)
Wednesday 10am-1pm, Room 3389
Over the past two decades, the
relationship between music and issues of gender and sexuality has become
a major field of scholarly inquiry. Among the studies that have
appeared, some seek to expand our knowledge of the musical activities of
women, others examine how concepts of gender and sexuality shape and are
shaped by musical practices and discourses, while still others
investigate the construction of desire and sexuality through music. The
approaches that these studies have taken have often been suggested by
developments in other fields, ranging from anthropology and cultural
studies to feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory. This seminar
will survey classic and recent writings on music, gender, and sexuality
in conjunction with background readings from other disciplines. Although
the focus will be on ethnomusicological writings, there will also be
readings on Western popular and concert musics. Included will be
readings on the musical construction of femininity, masculinity, and
heterosexuality; music as a mode of resistance to gender norms;
transvestite, transgendered, and "queer" performance; intersections of
gendered performance with issues of race and class; and the ethics of
feminist ethnography.
MUS
84300
Seminar in Theory/Analysis:
Musical Space
Prof. Straus (3 credits)
Tuesday, 10am–1pm. Room 3389.
Music theorists have long been interested in creating abstract
conceptual spaces through which music can be understood to move, from
the Guidonian hand through neo-Riemannian Tonnetze and
parsimonious voice-leading spaces. In this class, we will explore
(and create) musical spaces based on interval cycles, RI-chains,
contextual inversions, neo-Riemannian LPR, parsimonious voice leading,
Klumpenhouwer networks, Perleian twelve-tone tonality, and other useful
musical relationships. There will be ample opportunity for seminar
participants to share and critique ongoing research projects.
MUS 86300
Seminar in Music History: Topics in
American Music Studies
Prof. Taylor (3 credits)
Friday, 10am–1pm. Room
3389.
This seminar will examine the variety of
ways American music is currently being studied, with particular emphasis
on the influence of scholarship produced since 1990. Readings will be
drawn from musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, art history, and
other disciplines. Central to the class will be the exploration of an
“identity” for American Music, and its historical equation (now
frequently challenged) with music of the United States, as well as the
current interrogation of issues of race, gender, class and sexuality.
The course is not a survey, though it will move more or less
chronologically and music from a variety of periods will be examined.
Rather, the seminar will use a variety of repertories and styles to
examine how tools currently available to scholars, from both music and
related disciplines, help them understand and appreciate both music of
the United States and the art within the larger context of the Americas.
Topics will include (but not be limited to) early hymnody, black-face
minstrelsy, the music of Charles Ives, musical modernism of the 1920s
and 30s, musical theater since 1950 (especially Bernstein and Sondheim),
Motown in the 1960s, jazz (especially since 1960), and the contemporary
music scene. Final projects will be based on the students’ individual
interests.
MUS 85400
Intermediate Schenkerian Analysis
Prof. Gagne (3 credits)
Friday, 10am–1pm Room 3491.
Study of structure and style of the sonata-allegro and related forms in the
Classical and early Romantic eras. Weekly assignments in graphing. Prerequisite:
Schenkerian Analysis I or its equivalent.
MUS 86200 Jazz
Style and Context [Cross listed with ENGL 87300 & ASCP. 81500]
Prof. Giddins (3 credits)
Tuesday 4:15–6:15pm. Room TBA.
Open to Ph.D. students only.
Jazz is so often viewed through a single, narrow lens—the
chronological achievements of its most creative figures—that we
underestimate its importance as a mirror of the times. The familiar
narrative of jazz style as a progression of imaginative triumphs (also
known as the begat theory, e.g., trumpet player King Oliver begat Louis
Armstrong who begat Roy Eldridge who begat Dizzy Gillespie who begat
Miles Davis and so forth) ignores the true complexity of musical
influence and the historical realities to which jazz actually responds.
The Swing Era, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, soul jazz, avant-garde,
fusion, neoclassicism, and other jazz styles could have been born only
in the eras that did, in fact, produce them.
So what does jazz tell us about the American century in politics and
war, economics, technology, race and gender issues, and the pop culture
that borders one side of jazz and the high culture that borders the
other? In this course, we will examine three interrelated narratives in
tracing the history of jazz: 1) The chronological l’art pour l’art
narrative, in which creativity trumps other concerns and music is viewed
as a progressive phenomenon, producing a succession of freestanding
masterworks, 2) The fusion narrative, in which jazz reflects (through
commercial borrowings, parody, or outright critique) contemporary
culture, and 3) The historicist narrative, which is especially useful in
considering today’s jazz, and begins with the precept that creativity in
jazz is inextricably bound with its past.
Without recourse to musicology (definitely not a requirement for this
class), we begin with the basic structures of jazz—blues and pop song
form—and focus on the way they were used over time, by examining jazz
classics, jazz obscurities, and some of the outside influences that
define the broader musical mainstream in which jazz operates. We also
test our narratives against another historical template, in which this
new music originated as a local phenomenon, quickly conquered the world,
then retreated into an increasingly intellectual and ultimately
specialized pursuit, and was finally crowned as classic—finding a home
in academia and recognition from cultural support systems precisely at
the moment when it could no longer sustain an audience large enough to
crease the national conscience. What is jazz’s role today? What is meant
when some argue that it is now “post-historical”?
The course texts will include Visions of Jazz (Giddins) and
Jazz (De Veaux and Giddins). Course requirements include active
class participation and two reports: Each student will serve as a
co-lecturer for a particular class; all students will prepare original
reports (oral or written) for the final classes.
MUS 86600
Seminar in Music History: Surfing the Enlightenment
Prof. Kramer (3 credits)
Thursday, 10am–1pm Room 3491
"What is Enlightenment?" We return to a question
asked in 1783, and to the answers tendered by Kant and Moses
Mendelssohn, as a trigger to our own investigation of Enlightenment
thought in the arts and literature, with readings in Diderot (Rameau’s
Nephew, The Paradox of the Actor), Rousseau (The Origin of
Languages; Confessions), Herder (The Origins of Language),
Lessing (Laokoon), Goethe (commentary on Lessing; The Sorrows
of Young Werther), Sterne (Sentimental Journey through France and
Italy); and studies of the music of Haydn (Keyboard Variations in F
minor; The Creation), Gluck (Iphigénie
en Tauride–and Goethe’s Iphigenia), Mozart (aspects of
Idomeneo, Don Giovanni, Magic Flute), Emanuel Bach
(from the late collections of keyboard music "für
Kenner und Liebhaber"), among other works, probing the overarching
issues of genre, rhetoric and expression in the 1780s-90s. Finally, we
interrogate some early music of Beethoven for traces of a turn against
the wit of Enlightenment sensibility.
MUS
876000 Seminar in Music History: Old Music,
New Approaches
Profs. Atlas and
Stone (3 credits)
Tuesday, 2–5pm Room 3491.
This course will focus on the recent work of six
youngish scholars of Medieval and Renaissance music in order to offer a
snapshot of current trends in the field of Early Music. Aimed at an
interdisciplinary audience, the course will both consider methodological
and
historiographical aspects of early music scholarship as well as serving
as a graduate-level introduction to the major genres and styles of music
before 1650. Students outside the field of music will be particularly
welcome; reading knowledge of music will be helpful but not a
prerequisite for the course.
The logistics of the course will work as follows: after
a general, introductory session, speakers are scheduled to appear at the
seminar
every other week. During the "off-week," Professors Stone and Atlas will
lead an advance discussion of their papers and related readings;
note that the speakers will have submitted their papers, together with a
supplementary reading list, well in advance.
The six speakers: Bruce Holsinger (Professor of English
and Music, U. of Virginia), Emma Dillon (Associate Professor, University
of
Pennsylvania), Anne Stone (Associate Professor, Queens College and
Graduate Center), Jennifer Bloxam, (Associate Professor, Williams
College), Rob Wegman (Associate Professor, Princeton), and Mauro
Calcagno (Associate Professor, SUNY Stonybrook).
Students will write a short term paper on a topic of interest that in
one way or another relates to the repertory and/or methodologies of one
of the speakers
MUS
88400
Regional Studies: Music of Cuba and Puerto Rico
Prof.
Manuel (3 credits)
Monday, 2–5pm. Room 3491.
This seminar surveys the music cultures of Cuba and
Puerto Rico and their New York diasporas, while also encompassing salsa
and, in less depth, reggaeton and Latin rap. Other genres covered will
include Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican traditional musics, décima-based
genres, 19th-century contradanza and danza styles, commercial popular
dance musics, and early-twentieth-century Cuban art musics and zarzuela.
Dynamics of race, gender, creolization, and diasporic interactions will
be recurring themes. Grades will be based on a term paper, a short
analysis assignment, a class report on a reading, and class notes. While
many readings will be on e-reserve, we will also be reading all or most
of Robin Moore's Music & Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist
Cuba, more than half of his Nationalizing Blackness:
Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940, and
substantial portions of Ned Sublette's Cuba and its Music.
MUS
83800
Seminar
in Ethnomusicology: Music and Nationalism in Africa
and the Middle East
Prof. Blum
(3 credits)
Thursday, 2–5pm. Room 3491.
The seminar considers popular music in relation to
political developments in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Congo/Zaïre, Nigeria,
Ghana, the Manding regions, Algeria, Egypt, Israel and Turkey (with some
attention to other parts of Africa and the Middle East). Readings
include theoretical writings of historians and anthropologists as well
as studies of developments in the countries named, many of which address
complex intersections of nationalism, regionalism, ethnicity,
pan-African and pan-Arab movements. A central concern of the seminar,
pursued through exercises in transcription and analysis as well as
through discussion of readings, is how to identify “nationalist” aspects
of musical styles and genres in relation to other aspects of music and
other areas of social and cultural life.
MUS
89200 Composers
Forum
Prof. David Oan (3 credits)
Tuesday, 5:30-7:30pm, Room 3491.
The Composers Forum is a series of
presentations on composition-related issues by students, faculty and
distinguished visiting composers.
Music Programs • The Graduate Center,
CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue • New York, New York 10016-4309
(212) 817-8590 • music@gc.cuny.edu
