Courses Offered in Fall 2021 (110AY 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.

In Musicology Practicum I (autumn 2018), we focused on major writings addressing issues that occur often in scholarship in 19th- and 20th-century music, such as music aesthetics, gender studies, Orientalism, and social critique of modernity by scholars of the Frankfurt school. In this semester we will continue in a similar vein, but with a greater emphasis on works in ethnomusicology, as well as music’s relationship to social- and cultural studies. We will discuss how and why subject matter such as nationalism occur in both historical- and ethnomusicology, yet is approached differently in each discipline. We will also pick up some topics that we discussed last semester, including the issue of tastes, audience, and the culture of listening. Furthermore, we will discuss topics that come up more often in ethnomusicology such as approaches and methodologies in fieldwork.

This course focuses on significant and controversial issues in the recent scholarship of mid-late 19th-century European music, issues that will offer a critical approach of the music, including its creators, style, performers, performance practice and audience in this era. This focus is intended to help students develop independent and critical judgment on these issues, to strengthen their research and academic writing skills, and to sustain these skills with the aid of their performance background.

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.