Courses Offered in Fall 2020 (109AY 1S)

This graduate course introduces research methods, as well as the strategies and the “language” of writing about music to performance majors. We start with a brief review of the basics of research venues, tools, and crucial issues in and ethics of academic writing. We continue with a series of sample writings hand in hand with these principles. We will see how the authors focus on different aspects of perspectives in their discussion of music and how they develop and sharpen their arguments.

The aim of this course is to offer graduate performance majors necessary tools and directions to engage in an intelligent discussion of their repertory, skills that they may apply to their term projects, thesis writing, and lecture recitals. We will have two invited music scholars coming to discuss the ways that they phrase they theories arguments. The selected sample writings will enable us to see the variety of ways that an author may use to approach a music work.

In addition to our weekly discussion, short assignments, and quiz(zes), each student will function as a discussion leader in a class session; sign-up sheet will be distributed by week 4. At the end of the term, the class will be divided into several groups. Each group will present a chosen article or book chapter, discussing how the author’s approach to music and the pros and cons of this writing relate to the principles and basics that we have discussed earlier in the semester.

This course introduces a series of writings touching on various trends of thoughts in recent music scholarship, works that draw a connection between music and cultural studies. The aim of this course is to introduce how the study of music has been gone beyond “music in itself,” the ways how music is related to disciplines such as literature, gender studies, social studies. The writings involving examples from Western art music lean toward 19th- and 20th-century music. We will complement our discussion of these writings with issues in academic writing, and some strategies for the writing about music. The readings for each week are either available on NCTU library’s subscribed website (e.g., JSTOR) or posted on the course website. Recommended textbook on scholarship writing: Kate Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

We focus on 1-2 articles per week; Each student will take turns presenting an article every month, offering a close reading and critique of its major points. At the of the semester, each student will present an article not assigned in the course syllabus.

A pre-seminar to the study of music from a cultural and comparative perspective.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Whether in the building of instruments and concert halls or theoretical and aesthetic systems, music has always been interdisciplinary between technology and the humanities. Even though it asserted the status of an independent and autonomous art—“absolute music”—at the end of the 18th century, this development was neither isolated from Enlightenment ideas nor political and industrial revolutions of that time. Music historiography has long taken the absolute music paradigm for granted, focusing mostly on masterworks and their masters. But detached from its social and technological contexts, music could be no more than “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” This course aims to reconnect the art of music with technology and society, and takes its departure after the 1876 premiere of Richard Wagner’s monumental _Ring_ tetralogy in the custom-built and court-funded Bayreuth theater, which could be taken as the summation of European music culture. With the invention of phonography by Thomas Edison in 1877, music has entered what Walter Benjamin calls the “age of technological reproducibility,” when the production, transmission and reception of music was profoundly transformed. A chronological narrative of that transformation will be attempted here; the first half is a broader survey, the second spotlights on selective topics with more global perspective. Though compact and selective, this course should enable the students to understand the ebb and flow of music history within this time frame, and cultivate a critical sense to think about the meaning and value of musical creativity in the contexts of technological innovations and social restructuring.

This course offers an overview to Western art music from late Baroque to 1876, the year Wagner’s Ring was premiered. We will incorporate the music history of this period in the larger context of social and cultural developments, including the developments of aesthetics and technology. The goal of this course is twofold. Functioning as a remedial course, it offers graduate music students without sufficient knowledge in the history of Western art music a factual and conceptual grounding. Equally importantly, it approaches music as a cultural phenomenon, partaking and “bouncing back,” as an active force, to what was happening in social reforms, political upheavals, and innovations in technology and industry, including the inventions of music instruments, music devices, as well as well stagecraft, lighting, sound, and space.

There is no textbook per se for this course. However, students are encouraged to check out a copy of Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca’s A History of Western Music from the library. This source will provide basic information regarding charts, chronology, and terminology, factual information for a undergraduate music history survey course. Essential course readings are accessible either on the course website or NCTU’s library system, under electronic resources. Two quizzes focusing on repertoire building and score-reading will take place in mid- and end of the term. In addition to weekly course reading and listening assignments, each student will choose one reading and give a presentation; guidelines for the presentation will be distribute in W3.