Music Program Classes
Classes offered at the Graduate Center in
Spring2012
Click here for registration advisement hours
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 Programs • The Graduate Center,
CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue • New York, New York 10016-4309
(212) 817-8590 • music@gc.cuny.edu
