City University of New York Graduate Center Music PhD/DMA Program
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Music Program Classes

Classes offered at the Graduate Center in Spring2012  Click here for registration advisement hours

  Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

10am-
1pm (unless  noted otherwise)

MUS 85400 Intermediate Schenkerian Analysis Burstein

 

 

MUS 83100 Music, Gender, and Sexuality Sugarman

MUS 71500 DMA Topics Kahan 11:30am-1pm

 

MUS 86000
The Origins and Evolution of the Symphonic Poem MacIntyre

 

2pm-
5pm  (unless  noted otherwise)

MUS 81503 Classic and Early Romantic Performance PracticErickson

 

MUS 86100 Ralph Vaughan Williams Atlas; 1-3pm

MUS 81504 Performance Practice of the 20th and 21st Centuries Oppens/Eckardt; 4-7pm
 MUS 84000 The Music and Writings of Milton Babbitt Nichols/Straus 2-5pm; 5:30-6:30pm

MUS 86200 Local and Global Perspectives in Spanish Music Manuel/Pizà
 

MUS 86600 Surfing the Enlightenment Kramer
 
 

Evening

MUS 84100 British Pop and Rock Music in the Post-Beatles Era Spicer

 

MUS 89200 Composers Forum  Olan; 7:30-9pm    MUS 71000 Teaching Proseminar Stone 5:30-7:30pm

 
 

Click here for schedule of Fall 2011 classes               


MUS 71500 DMA Topics
Prof. Kahan Wednesday 11:30am-1pm   Room 3491

MUS 71000 Teaching Proseminar
Prof. Olan 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 81001 Studio Tutorial (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
MUS 81002 Studio Tutorial (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
MUS 81003 Studio Tutorial (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
MUS 81004 Studio Tutorial (Room and Campus TBA) Staff

MUS 81101 Ensemble (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
MUS 81102 Ensemble (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
MUS 81103 Ensemble (Room and Campus TBA) Staff
MUS 81104 Ensemble (Room and Campus TBA) Staff

MUS 81503 Classic and Early Romantic Performance Practice
Prof. Erickson Monday 10am-1pm   Room 3491
    
This course, intended primarily for DMA students, covers the period ca. 1750-1900. It is practical course, intended to make students aware of the differences between modern performance practices and those that were conventional at the time music of the period 1750-1900, and how the use of modern instruments can be adapted to bring performance today more in line with the practices of the past. The course will consist primarily of introductory lectures by the instructor, class reports on specific topics of performance practice, and coachings of student performances focused on historical performance practices. Students will submit summaries of five books relevant to the course as well as a term paper--following formal protocols of documentation appropriate to the dissertation each student will presumably write--summarizing what has been learned by the individual student in the course. Since improvisation was a skill assumed in most of the period under discussion, the role and techniques of improvisation will be addressed and the last class will be devoted to student improvisations (cadenzas, ornamented Lieder or arias, preludes, etc.).

MUS 81504 Performance Practice of the 20th and 21st Centuries
Profs. Oppens/Eckardt Tuesday 4-7pm  Room 3491
  
  Designed for both composers and performers, the course explores the performance of 20th- and 21st-century music. Weekly meetings will be devoted to the coaching and critique of both student composition assignments and representative works. The class will culminate with a mandatory public concert on May 15 in Elebash Hall featuring important repertoire works and music composed by the students.

MUS 83100 Music, Gender, and Sexuality
Prof. Sugarman 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, while others examine how concepts of gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by musical practices and discourses, or how musical constructions of gender or sexuality intersect with issues of race, nation, or class.  The approaches that these studies have taken have often been suggested by developments in fields ranging from anthropology and cultural studies to feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory.  This seminar will examine some recent writings on music, gender, and sexuality in conjunction with background readings from other disciplines.  Weekly units will alternate between selections of articles and monographs on particular musical topics.  Although the focus will be on ethnomusicological writings, there will also be readings on Western popular and concert music.  Included will be readings on musical constructions of gender and sexuality; music as a mode of resistance to gender norms; transvestite, transgendered, and "queer" performance; and the ethics of feminist ethnography.  Instructor's permission required.

MUS 84000 The Music and Writings of Milton Babbitt
Profs. Nichols/Straus Wednesday, 2-5pm; 5:30-6:30pm  Room 3941
    
A survey of the music and writings of Milton Babbitt, with a focus on the close reading and analysis of musical and written texts. We will emphasize issues of musical performance, and the class will include a weekly “Practicum Hour,” 5:30-6:30PM, during which experienced performers of this music will give interactive lectures and demonstrations. Weekly written assignments and final project will permit students to approach Babbitt from different vantage points, as theorists, historians, composers, and performers.

MUS 84100 British Pop and Rock Music in the Post-Beatles Era
Prof. Spicer Monday 6:30-9pm   Room 3491 (doctoral students in music only)
    This seminar offers an intensive study of British pop and rock music recorded and released over the past four decades or so, what might be described as the “Post-Beatles Era.” We will focus mainly on the myriad styles and subgenres of pop and rock that emerged in the U.K. during the 1970s and early 1980s — including heavy metal, progressive rock, glam, punk, two tone, and synthpop — with a special emphasis placed on analysis of the recorded music itself. Our readings will be drawn from the ever-growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship devoted to British pop and rock. In particular, we will repeatedly ask why is it that so much of pop and rock music since the Beatles cannot be understood properly without taking into account their remarkable influence. Coursework will involve weekly reading and listening assignments, weekly short papers in response to the reading and listening, and a substantial final conference-style paper (which may take many shapes or forms, but typically students will present close analyses of a song or group of songs of their own choosing). Limited to doctoral students in music, or with special permission of the instructor.

MUS 85400 Intermediate Schenkerian Analysis
Prof. Burstein Monday 9am-1pm    Room 3491
    This course will focus on the practice and theory of Schenkerian analysis. Intensive work in analysis of selections from the tonal literature will be supplemented by close readings of Schenker's theoretical and analytical writings as well as readings from the secondary literature. Prerequisite: Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis (Music 74500) or consent of the instructor. 

MUS 86100 Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Early Years (to W.W. I)
Prof. Atlas Tuesday 1-3pm  Room 3389
     This course is devoted to studying Ralph Vaughn WIlliams’s “early years” (up to the onset of World War I). Over the course of the semester, the class consider no fewer than twenty-eight works with a lens that constantly changes focus. In addition, the class will examine Vaughn WIlliams’s activities as a collector of folk songs and as the editor of The English Hymnal. And in order to place Vaughn WIlliams’s early years into a wider context, the class will also consider a small number of his later works, as well as pieces by such contemporaries as Parry, Holst, Butterworth, Stanford, Elgar, Somervell, and Ireland.    
     (1) Three distinguished guests will visit during the course of the semester: Rufus Hallmark to speak about the song cycle Songs of Travel, Julian Onderdonk on Ralph Vaughn WIlliams’s activities in connection with folk music and the English Hymnal, and Alain Frogley on A London Symphony. (2) Recordings of all the music discussed will be made available in an anthology-like format, as will all the scores except for those of the two symphonies that will be discussed. (3) Please read the following for the first session: Alain Frogley, “Constructing Englishness in Music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams,” in Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Alain Frogley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-22.  (4) Since students will need to be familiar with the final chapter of H.G. Well’s novel Tono-Bungay (1908-1909) on the grounds that Ralph Vaughn WIlliams himself claimed that the novel has something to do with the final portion of A London Symphony, students might just like to get a head start and read the novel in its entirety; there are two easily available paperback editions, both of which come with commentaries and notes: that in the series called Oxford World Classics (New York: OUP, 1996) and the one in the Penguin Classics series (London: Penguin Books, 2005).

MUS 86200 Local and Global Perspectives in Spanish Music
Profs. Manuel/Pizà Wednesday, 2-5pm  Room 3389
    
This course xplores selected topics in Spanish music. While providing a historical overview of music in Spain, special attention will be devoted to topics such as: flamenco (history, formal structures, sub-styles, and social status), the Hispanic legacy in the Americas, contemporary popular music (in Ibiza and elsewhere), the guitar and its repertoire, legacies of the cosmopolitan Moorish period (including Judeo-Spanish music and North African Andalusian music), and images of Spain in the European imagination. Genres and composers to be discussed include zarzuela, habanera, vihuela, art and vernacular song traditions, and the music of Falla, Albéniz, Soler, Victoria, Scarlatti, and other twentieth-century composers. Invited guests may include specialists in flamenco guitar and dance, classical guitar music, and North African Andalusian music. The course combines topics and approaches associated with ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and popular music studies.

MUS 86600 Surfing the Enlightenment
Prof. Kramer Thursday 2-5pm   Room 3491
    
“What is Enlightenment?” Innocently put in 1783, the question provoked responses from Kant, Hamann and Moses Mendelssohn that will serve as an entry into our own investigation of Enlightenment thought in the arts and literature. Readings in: Rousseau (The Origin of Languages), Herder (The Origins of Language), Lessing (Laokoon), Goethe (commentary on Lessing), Diderot (Rameau’s Nephew; The Paradox of the Actor), Sterne (Sentimental Journey through France and Italy). Studies of the music: toward a definition of genre (Lied, Sonata); Emanuel Bach (from the late collections of keyboard music “für Kenner und Liebhaber”), Haydn (Keyboard Variations in F minor; The Creation), Gluck (Iphigénie en Tauride–and Goethe’s Iphigenia), Mozart and the challenge of opera (seria: Idomeneo; buffa: Don Giovanni; Singspiel: Zauberflöte)–and critical studies around those works.
     Intensive writing in three brief papers, to be presented to the seminar, and a modestly longer final project. If you don’t yet have German, this is an opportunity to begin that adventure. A little French and Italian wouldn’t hurt.

MUS 86000 The Origins and Evolution of the Symphonic Poem
Prof. MacIntyre  Friday 10am-1pm   Room 3491
    
The history and stylistic development of an orchestral genre from its operatic origins in the early eighteenth century through its nineteenth-century manifestations as concert overture, symphonic poem, and tone poem to its alleged “death” in the early twentieth century. Repertoire will include generic precursors by Rameau, Beethoven and von Weber, Liszt’s philosophic and pictorial poems, and Richard Strauss’s “tone poems” for orchestra. Interpretative challenges, aesthetic quandaries, and critical aspects (e.g., ekphrasis; topoi, etc.) of such “program” music. Assigned readings (writings by composers and critics, as well as Dahlhaus, Kivy, Taruskin, Goehr, Bruhn, Casler, L. Kramer, et al.) and score study. Ability to read French and German will be helpful, but not required. Regular in-class reports and a term paper (15-25pp.) analyzing and situating a particular work in its socio-cultural context.

MUS 89200 Composers Forum
Prof. Olan Tuesday  7:30-9pm  Room 3491
   The Composers Forum is a series of meetings on topics of interest to composers. There will be guest composers from inside and outside CUNY; presentations by students on their own work and discussion of the best ways to present one’s own work; and discussions of technical, musical and professional issues in contemporary composition.



 

Music ProgramsThe Graduate Center, CUNY
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