Courses Offered in Fall 2011 (100AY 1S)

1. Source studies: written, notational, audio-visual
2. Writing: style and format
3. Computational Skills: Word, Endnote, On-line Databases, Tempo Map, Sonic Visualizer.
Every one should pursue an individual term project in tempo or edition studies.

A writing seminar where individual research projects (e.g. thesis, course work) are presented and discussed. Focus will be on theoretical and methodological issues in musicological research and writing, from the mundane question of form and style to the deep question of value and meaning. The aim is to help each other to be a more experienced and critical writer of academic paper. The end "product" for each participant will be a revised and improved paper (oral and written). A mini-conference and an anthology of selected paper are planned.
At the same time, we'll be practicing the "art and craft" of "conferencing," and hope to foster a sense of academic community among us.

A core-course in two semesters for all year-one music major students. Those who are interested in writing research paper in music are also welcome. In the first semester, we'll be exploring about the what, why and how of music research, in the second, further detailed practice of the craft of thesis writing. We'll be doing a lot of thinking, reading, talking and writing, in and out of the classroom. An important companion throughout our journey will be the computer and the Internet. Our aim is to train ourself to be a modern-day musician-scholar, who can make music and make sense of music cleverly and critically. Concrete "product" at the end of the semester will be a mini-conference and if possible, an anthology of selected written work. Reading assignments for composers and musicologists will cover a broad range of topics such as composition, opera, popular music, music theory and technology.

This is a 1-credit practical course to understand (and sing) German Lieder. After an introductory unit on the German language generally, we'll practice concrete examples to understand and experience the so called "marriage of poetry and music." Recordings will be compared as illustrations.
The examples we'll study in this course will be Gustav Mahler's cyclic works that have been so central to his whole oeuvre, from the early Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen to the late Das Lied von der Erde. N.b. 2011 is the 100th anniversary of Mahler's death.

The nineteenth century is a “strange” era in which strongly contrasting styles coexisted. The stylistic trends of monumentality, virtuosity, and intimacy are to a certain extent distinct from each other, yet they also interact with one another in some musical genres. In addition to these diverse styles, attitudes towards the past and aesthetic accounts of vocal and instrumental music show a paradoxical tendency in the nineteenth century. Both restrained and bold attitudes towards the tradition are for example embodied by nineteenth-century views of the legacy of Beethoven. The purpose of this class is to introduce the concepts of monumentality, virtuosity, and intimacy in different genres, alongside the historiographical and aesthetic debates that characterized musical thought in the nineteenth century.

The concept of “absolute music” has been a central preoccupation of both the historiography and aesthetics of Western music from the Classical and Romantic periods to the present. The idea of “pure instrumental music” emerged in the early nineteenth century as part of a shift in musical thought that revised the status of instrumental music from an art that offered pleasing diversion to one that expressed the sublime. This new paradigm inevitably raised debates in the mid-nineteenth century between proponents of the New German School and Eduard Hanslick. These debates have continued in the twentieth century: Theodor Adorno and the “New Musicology” of the 1990s (largely animated by Adorno’s influence) questioned the possibility of musical “purity” associated with the tradition of absolute music. This course will present an overview of the history of the concept through selected readings.