Courses Offered in Fall 2016 (105AY 1S)

Our main tasks are professional and academic writings; the skills involved are bibliographical, evaluative, and communicative. The aim is to train ourselves to be a up-to-date musician-scholar-intellectual, able to make music and make sense of music creatively and critically.

Our course is designed as a cycle of four stages:

1. REFLECTING: We'll start our intellectual journey by "musing" on who we are and what we do. These will be expressed practically in our CVs and performance portfolio (posters, bios, program lists and notes).
2. RESEARCHING: Then we'll learn the craft of thesis-writing thru evaluating and emulating selected examples.
3. REPORTING: And we'll meet our "audience" by written and oral presentations, considering the aspects of form and style.
4. REVIEWING: Finally, we'll come to full circle with reflecting and rethinking of who we are and how to become who we want to be. The journey has just begun...

On the whole, we'll be doing a lot of thinking, reading, talking and writing, in and out of the classroom. Our TAs will arrange with you to hold a weekly group tutorial hour. In addition, please don't hesitate to make an appointment with me at my office hour. Concrete "products" at the end of the semester will be a mini-conference and an anthology of selected written work.

(After the more theoretical first semester we'll be getting more practical with the different sources and resources [notational, audio-visual] in the second semester, offered as an elective course.)

Taking a hands-on and interactive heuristic approach, we will learn, practise, and reflect on those works of our trade such as writing, editing, conferencing, and event management. Our aim is to become a compleat musicologist, ready for a wide range of careers.

This course is a proseminar on the aesthetic ideas and compositional practice of Richard Wagner.

The first half of the course, led by Dr. Kam, will elucidate Wagner’s conception of Gesamtkunstwerk in juxtaposition with the ideas of absolute music. Adopting a contextual approach, we will map Wagner on to the intellectual landscape of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Hanslick; on the other hand, the reading of historical sources will be accompanied by recent literature. The aim is to facilitate a historical and theoretical understanding of the major music aesthetic issue of romanticism which is still very much a part of our present music culture.

The second half of the course, led by Dr. Lee, will explore issues in recent Wagner scholarship, including his intellectual development, his aesthetic construct, his creative process, and prevailing analytic methods of his music. We will concentrate on one theme each week, in which we will do a close reading of primary sources (e.g., Wagner’s prose writings and facsimile or transcription of his manuscripts), as well as a critical reading of secondary literature in Wagner studies.

A pre-seminar to the study of music from a cultural and comparative perspective. An international seminar on Sonic Modernity 1800 in December will complement our course.