University of Pennsylvania - Department of Music

Description: Analysis, discussion, techniques and aesthetics of 20th-21st
Century Music from 1945. Messiaen, Boulez Stockhausen, Penderecki, Zimmermann,
Rochberg and others, ending with special emphasis on music from 1990-2008.

Music 530: Electronic Music, Jim Primosch
Thursday, 2:00-5:00 p.m., FB 407
Introduction to techniques of electronic composition.

Music 605: Anthropology of Music, Carol Muller
R 2:00-5:00 p.m. Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Worlds of Music/Music Worlds
This seminar will require in-depth reading, listening, and writing about a group
of musical cultures often included in teaching about "World Music." In other
words, this seminar will require students to read a monograph a week, listen
closely to related music, and write responsively to this material. We begin
with thinking about the musical "exotic" and move onto a series of musical
cultures from a wide range of places. The seminar will end with a discussion
of the larger music, intellectual, and methodological issues and challenges to
thinking about worlds of music/music worlds as a comparative project. Those
who imagine they will have to teach a course on "World Music and Cultures" at
the undergraduate or graduate level, either sooner or later, will benefit from
this class.

Music 620: Tonal Analysis, Ingrid Arauco (Haverford College)
F 2:00-5:00 p.m., FB 407

Course Description: Techniques of analysis applied to music of the eighteenth, nineteenth,
and early twentieth centuries. Topics to be covered include the nature and aims of musical analysis,
chromatic harmony and the limitations of Roman-numeral labeling, and forms in various style periods.
This course will not entail a comprehensive study of a single method or analytic viewpoint, but rather
draw selectively from a range of ideas and techniques.

Music 750: Studies in 19th Century Music [French Opéra Comique and Operetta 1860-1933], Carolyn Abbate
M 2:00-5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Course Description: This seminar covers the history of French “dialogue opera” genres from the second
empire to the 1930s. We will look both at stage works, and film operettas. Topics to be considered
include the aesthetics of frivolity, the social function of operetta, musical parody and its registers,
the anti-Wagnerian movement in France and Germany, and the relationship between
French Trivialmusik and the cultural formation of Weimar-era Berlin.

Music 770: Studies in American Music, Guthrie Ramsey
W 2:00-5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Course Description: This course will consider the American musical landscape from the colonial
period to the present with an emphasis, though not exclusive focus, on non-written traditions. The course is not a chronological journey, but rather a topical treatment of the various issues in the history of American
music. Some of the specific, project-oriented activities of the course will consist of, but will not be limited to the following: (1) participating in the development of a traveling exhibition on the Apollo Theater for the Smithsonian
Institution; (2) development of a permanent website for a history of jazz course at Penn; (3) reviewing two manuscripts for publication to a major press; (4) developing a working proposal for a history of African American music. In this context students will learn the basics of contemporary music criticism, which includes: identifying a work’s significant musical gestures; positioning those gestures within a broader field of musical rhetoric, conventions, and social contracts; and theorizing the conventions with respect to large systems of
cultural knowledge, such as historical, geographical contexts as well as the lived experiences of audiences, composers, performers, and dancers. Other topics covered will be the origin and development of American popular music, the gendered and racial aspects of American classical music, and American music
historiography.

Music 780: Seminar in Theory [Musical Repetition], Mark Butler
T 2:00-5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar Room, VPL

Course Description: This seminar will explore the implications and possibilities of
repetition in music, viewed through the lenses of theory, analysis, and other intellectual traditions. Listening and analysis will be drawn from a wide variety of styles.

Fall 2008

Music 608: Graduate Core Course: Writing about Music, Carolyn Abbate and Emily Dolan
Tuesday/thursday 2-5 p.m., Marian Anderson Seminar Room, Van Pelt Library
Course description: Writing about music is team-taught course, designed to introduce first year
graduates to a broad spectrum of ideas and approaches to music, and to develop their skills for writing about music. This course is not about establishing fixed models and methodologies; nor does it set out to debate disciplinarity, or to give students full coverage of any one field. Rather, itwill examine
music in its fullest definition (as sound, text, memory, belief and so on), selecting materials from the broadest possible temporal and geographicarange. There will be the chance to work both in depth on materials with individual professors, and also collaboratively and comparatively during sessions in which faculty teach
side-by-side. As well as helping students to develop new skills (archival, analytical, critical), and to engage with musical traditions and materials foreign to them until now, this course also encourages students to experiment
with new approaches to their own fields of interest. The class will meet twice per week for two hours each time. There will be a substantial written component, with four written assignments during the semester in addition to a
llonger project.

Music 700: Seminar in Composition, Anna Weesner
Monday, 2-5 p.m., Fisher Bennet Hall, room 407
Seminar on self-referential narrative in music; compositional and analytical projects.

Music 705: Seminar in Ethnomusicology, Tim Rommen
Friday, 2-5 p.m, Fisher Bennet Hall, room 407
Course Description:This semester we will explore by way of a series of journeys the historical and contemporary shapes of tourism within the Caribbean with specific reference to the ways that musicians and performance practices have travelled and continue to move through the economic, political, geographic, and cultural spaces of consumption. These journeys will be framed by matched sets of readings that illustrate not only the abiding issues that have confronted Caribbean societies throughout the years, but also the changing terrain upon which solutions to those issues have been sought and articulated. We will be travelling along routes that variously explore travel writing, literature, folklore, travel and mobility theory, and ethnographic monographs, all with a view toward helping us think through the issues at hand. Although we will be spending a good portion of our time thinking about the Bahamas, we will also take time to consider music and tourism in places like Carriacou, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Ultimately, these journeys will provide a framework within which to consider our own work. While the course readings will be centered on Caribbean contexts, your final papers should address tourism and travel in ways that inform your own interests and scholarly work.

Music 710: Seminar in Medieval Studies, Emma Dillon
Monday, 2-5 p.m., Marian Anderson Seminar room, Van Pelt Library
Course Description: To Be announced

Music 720: Seminar in Renaissance Music, Gary Tomlinson
Wednesday, 2-5 p.m., Marian Anderson Seminar room, Van Pelt Library
Toward a Biocultural Musicology

It is fair to say that most musicological and ethnomusicological studies over the last fifty years have been instances of local studies, aiming to understand the workings of particular social and cultural practices of music, of particular societies and their musics, or of specific musical genres, styles, and repertories themselves. This has been as true of studies embedded in elaborated non-musical contexts (i.e., studies in ethnomusicology and contextual music history) as of internalist studies of music (e.g., repertorial studies and analysis). To be sure, some of the most wide-ranging of these studies have aimed to generalize out from the local in order to form broader conclusions about music and music-making; but few—with the exception of studies of music cognition—have taken as their aim the understanding of the most basic human commonalities in musical practices and the underlying conditions of these shared features.

This situation has changed over the last decade or so with the development of new studies in the evolutionary psychology and physiology of music, with the tentative broaching of a sweeping neocomparativist musicology, and with the continued elaboration of music cognition studies. The time is now ripe to ask how these general studies might be linked to the results of the local studies that have been the métier of musicology and ethnomusicology alike. This seminar will set out to provide some preliminary answers to this question. It will bring together readings both musicological and extra-musicological, attempting to relate broad findings concerning musical cognition and embodiment to case studies of musical practice. It will range across the subdisciplines of music theory, ethnomusicology, and historical musicology with an eye to sketching the outlines of a global history of human music-making that might highlight the universal conditions for and features of the myriad traditions it embraces. It will take up such broad issues as the changing relations of music and technology (including writing); the ubiquitous connections of music and metaphysics (spirituality, religion, etc.); combinatoriality and emergent complexity in music, language, writing, and other human phenomena; semiotic (or representational) vs. information-processing views of music; even questions of musical cognition beyond Homo sapiens.

While participating in the general discussion across the semester, students will be searching out specific research topics of their own, topics relating the seminar conversation back toward the subdisciplines in which they aim to specialize. (Finally, in case it is not yet obvious, note that the seminar will not aim in any direct way to fulfill the title of the rubric under which it appears, “Studies in Renaissance Music.”)

Spring 2008

Music 516: Analysis of Post-1950 20th Century Music, Anna Weesner
Tuesday 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.,Room 208
Analytical Studies of 20th century music focusing on post World War II music.

Music 525: Composition Selected Forms, Jay Reise
Thursday, 2:00-5:00 p.m., Room 208
Study of the style and form of one genre, composer, or historical period, with
emphasis on written projects.

Music 609: Introduction to Music (Part II--Core Course), Butler/Ramsey
Wednesday/Thursday 2:00-5:00 p.m., Marion Anderson Seminar room VPL
To be announced

Music 650/250: Field Methods in Ethnomusicology, Carol Muller
T 2:00-5:00 p.m.
The goal of the seminar is to give students a compressed dissertation research
experience--taking them from the beginnings of "researching" a community and
its music, through the documentation and representation stages. Students do
background and methods reading, though the focus of the class is the
development of basic ethnographic and documentation skills. This is a
community partnership seminar, which means that all forms of representation are
produced in collaboration with community partners in West Philadelphia. These
include photographic essays, an NPR style audio documentary, but most
significantly, twenty-thirty minute documentary films on a particular subject.
See sample syllabus and projects on
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/music/westphillymusic

Music 710/COMP638/FREN 638 401, Etymologies of Medeival Song, Dillon/Brownlee
M 2:00-5:00 p.m.

This course will explore the main repertories of medieval lyric from the dual perspectives of words and music (and disciplinary perspectives of musicology and literary studies). Our focus will be vernacular song and poetry from the late thirteenth to early fifteenth centuries, including detailed exploration of some of the following: polytextual motet, music and poetry of Adam de la Halle, the Roman de Fauvel, Machaut, Ciconia and some early Dufay. In exploring how late thirteenth-century writers and composers defined themselves as part of a tradition, we will also look back to their ‘history’ – to the repertory of troubadour lyrics.

The course will place particular emphasis on the ways medieval writers and musicians construed their creations, and the many productive tensions between language and sound; singing and speaking; words and music. We will explore how that concern with etymologies of song played out not only in the lyrics themselves, but also in theoretical writing about song, and in its manuscript representation and codification. Included in our discussions will be writings by Johannes de Grocheio, Philippe de Vitry, Brunetto Latini and Deschamps, and consideration of a range of chansonniers, including the Chansonnier du roi, the Montpellier Codex, and the Machaut manuscripts.

The course is organized around four key themes, running roughly chronologically, and framing four models by which medieval poets and composers defined song. We will each lead one seminar around a given theme, with the idea of giving you two different takes on a topic. Readings will be geared towards a rich range of primary materials – literary, musical, theoretical, manuscripts ad so on. In addition, musically orientated weeks will include close readings of specific songs, hopefully with live performance. We will also assign a small selection of secondary readings each week, along with a fuller bibliography of recommended (but not mandatory) reading. These are intended to offer students fresh to either discipline some sense of the concerns and themes that shape our respective approaches to song. We will top and tail the semester with two jointly taught classes, intended to serve as workshops in what a collaborative engagement with song may look like.

Course evaluation

We hope that our collaboration will encourage students to approach song from the dual disciplinary perspectives set out this semester, and to engage with song in as holistic a manner as possible. With this in mind, we will devote the final three classes to student presentations in a workshop format. At the heart of your presentation will be a close literary and musical engagement with a song or group of songs. Your presentation will form the basis for a longer final paper, worth 75% of the final grade. In addition, there will be smaller assignments throughout the semester worth 25%.

Music 750/STSC 418: Studies in Romantic Music, Emily Dolan/John Tresch
F 2:00-5:00 p.m.
The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the invention of many new instruments
in both music and science. They were sometimes made by the same people, and they
were often understood to have the same purpose: to attune individuals to the
rhythms, proportions, and harmonies of nature. This seminar draws connections
between music, science, politics, ethics and aesthetics between 1750 and 1850,
a crucial point in European history. We will examine the role of instruments in
conceptions of nature, society, and the individual, traversing the clockwork
regularity of the Enlightenment, the turbulent longings of Romanticism, and the
spooky delirium of the fantastic. The course begins with light refracting
through prisms; it ends with the blaring trombones of Berlioz’s opium-induced
Symphonie Fantastique; along the way we will visit ideas of mimesis, mechanical
observation, theories of the passions, global science, demonic virtuosity,
phantasmagoria, the uncanny, and the paradoxes of bourgeois selfhood. Through
working with actual instruments and reading primary texts, students will be
invited to question received notions in intellectual history. The class is open
to creative undergraduates and graduates from any field who want to explore a
range of ideas of what it means to be human in the modern world.

Spring 2006

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, James Primosch
Day/Time/Location TBA
Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:
-sight singing (including C clefs)
-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations
-accurate performance of rhythms
-general keyboard skills
-score reading at the keyboard

Music 516: Analysis of Post-1950 20th Century Music, Jay Reise
Tuesday 2-5PM, Bennett Hall Room 407
Post-1950 20th-21st Century Music including aesthetic discussion and analysis of Stravinsky, Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Penderecki, Zimmermann, American composers, and works composed 1990 - 2005.

Music 604: Historiography, Gary Tomlinson
Tuesday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library, Marian Anderson Seminar Room
Theories and models of historical investigation. Analysis of both historiographic writings and musicological works exemplifying particular approaches.

Music 620: Analytical Methods: Tonal Music, Mark Butler
Monday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library, Marian Anderson Seminar Room
Current methods in the analysis of tonal music.
To prepare for first class on January 9h, please do the following:
1. Read Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis, pp. 16-26.
2. Read William Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music, pp. 1-32 and 68-91.
3. Analyze the first movement of Mozart's Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 332.
Provide a complete harmonic analysis and detailed labels for the parts of the sonata form. Diagram the phrase structure of mm. 1-22 and 41-56, and be prepared to discuss the phrase structure of any other part of the piece. Turn all this in on a neatly marked-up copy of the score, and bring another copy of the score with your analysis to class for discussion.
The two readings are on Blackboard and on reserve in the library (You will have to register for the course before you can access the Blackboard site). If you don't have access to a copy of the Mozart, it should be readily
available through online sheet music sites.
The analysis will not be for a letter grade, but please do your best; I want to see where you are coming into the course. We will move on to more advanced analytical approaches and concerns shortly after this class.

Music 650: Field Methods in Ethnomusicology, Carol Muller
Wednesday 2-5PM, Bennett Hall Room 407
This course explores various methodological problems and theoretical constructs that confront us during the course of ethnomusicological fieldwork. How can we approach writing about our ethnographic work without silencing the voices of those who should be heard? In what ways might transcription and notation complicate power structures and reinforce our own musical values? What special challenges need to be negotiated in the process of documenting ethnographies on film? How do ethical and economic dilemmas inform our approach to making sound recording? A series of readings in ethnomusicology and anthropology will suggest some answers to these questions--answers that will, in turn, be tested by means of several interconnected fieldwork projects focused on gospel music in West Philadelphia. Our readings and fieldwork experiences will shape our classroom discussions, leading not only to be a better understanding of ethnomusicological methods, but also to a deeper appreciation of the "shadows" that we cast in the field.

Music 654: Early Modern Seminar: Novelties and the Novel (1680-1730), Joan DeJean (Romance Languages) and Bethany Wiggin (Romance Languages)
Cross Listed with ENGL 730, FREN 654, GRMN 665
Tuesday 2-4PM, Williams Hall Room 304
At the turn of the eighteenth century, the novel established itself throughout Europe as the pre-eminent literary genre. It was seen above all as a radically new literary form, a novelty. At the same time as the novel was becoming prominent, many other kinds of novelties such as coffee and chocolate first became part of the European landscape. At the same moment the fashion industry was born when high fashion was first marketed to a broad public. And perhaps the ultimate novelty in this story was the novel’s gender bias: it was the only form in literary history to have been produced massively by women.
This seminar will explore the ways in which histories of the novel and of contemporary novelties such as coffee and high fashion were intertwined. We will pay particular attention to another contemporary genre, the newspaper, whose rise in the early modern period was essential to the marketing of novelties. We will also focus on the process of translation by means of which the novel spread rapidly through England, France, and Germany.
Among the novels we will discuss: Robinson Crusoe and The Princesse de Clèves, the two “founding” texts of the modern novel. Other texts may include: fairy tales, d’Aulnoy’s travel novels, Manon Lescaut, Thousand and One Nights. Among the subjects to be considered: fashion prints, advertising and broadsheets, journals and book reviews, treatises on coffee, travel narratives, musical novelties (such as vaudevilles and early opera), letter-writing guides, and dictionaries and language manuals.
All works to be discussed will be available in English, French, and German, in the original text and in translations from the early modern period.
We will also maintain a focus on research methods. The seminar will be held on the 6 th floor of Van Pelt so that we can have access every week to materials from Penn’s rare book collection.

Music 700: Seminar in Composition, Eric Moe, Visiting Professor from University of Pittsburgh
Monday 2-5PM, Bennett Hall Room 407
Seminar on self-referential narrative in music; compositional and analytical projects.

Music 710: Studies in Medieval Music, Emma Dillon
Thursday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library, Marian Anderson Seminar Room
This course explores the variety of modes for writing about music and musical experience in the Middle Ages, from both the modern and medieval perspective. Aimed at introducing students to key research in the field of medieval musicology, and to a wide range of primary evidence (notated, theoretical, literary and visual) relating to medieval music, the course focuses attention on the problems and questions we encounter when trying to write about medieval music, and, no less important, what it meant to write about music and musical experience in the Middle Ages. What were the theoretical and theological frameworks in which medievals placed sacred musical experience? Conversely, how did they legitimize secular musical cultures outside the framework of the sacred? How were musical traditions established, and what did a ‘history’ of music signify in the medieval period? How, more fundamentally, was musical sound distinguished from other sorts of sounds? What was the effect of music, and how did medievals both represent and make sense of music’s ineffable, sensual powers? In turn, what are the critical, analytical, theoretical and philological skills we need today to make sense of the musical objects of the medieval past? These are some of the questions we will address throughout the semester. Using the double vision of primary and secondary materials, the course aims, above all, to give students a ‘hands-on’ experience of medieval musical culture, and to encourage students to develop their own writerly voices.
The course will focus on key repertories including early chant and polyphony; troubadour and trouvère song, and the songs of the interpolated romance tradition; and music in Trecento Italy. We will also explore a repertory of song for which there is – never was – any notated evidence: namely, the vast repertory of imaginary music, from the music of the spheres, to the songs sung by angels in Paradise. Investigation of the notated presence of these repertories will be complemented by exploration of a range of written – and occasionally, visual – responses to them. These will include theoretical responses including Boethius, John the Deacon, Guido, Notker, John of Garland and others; Latin writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux, John of Salisbury, Hugh of St. Victor; and in vernacular literary contexts including the anonymous razos and vidas supplementing the troubadour cansos, writings of Dante, Machaut and others. Recent scholarship will include work by medievalists and musicologists such as Leo Treitler, Ardis Butterfield, Anna Maria Busse Berger, Simon Gaunt, Sarah Kay, Caroline Bynum, Bruce Holsinger, Rachel Fulton, Karl Morrison, and many others.
For those new to medieval music, this course will serve as a thorough introduction to the field, and will offer coverage of some of the main repertories, manuscripts and primary written sources of the European tradition. For those already experienced in medieval studies, the course will serve to complement existing expertise with exposure to a range of primary sources relating to music. While students will be expected to write throughout the semester, there will be considerable flexibility in the written assignments, which will be designed to allow students both to experiment with new modes of writing, and to refine and develop established research and writing interests.

Fall 2005

Music 508: Advanced Musicianship, James Primosch
Day/Time TBA
Goals of the course include increasing proficiency in:
-sight singing (including C clefs)
-taking harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic dictations
-accurate performance of rhythms
-general keyboard skills
-score reading at the keyboard
A diagnostic text will be given at the first class meeting (Monday, September 12, 12:00 - 12:50 pm in Room 101). Students will be divided as needed into groups according to skill level. Each group will meet twice a week for 50 minutes. Short individual meetings focusing on keyboard skills will also be scheduled.

Music 515: Analysis of 20th Century Music, James Primosch
Monday 2-5PM, Music Bldg Room 208
The course will study selected compositional strategies employed by composers across the 20th century. Students should acquire a copy of "Remaking the Past: Tradition and Influence in Twentieth-Century Music" by Joseph Straus (used copies are available online). Other readings will be distributed in class. Students should also purchase a score (either a full score or the piano reduction - both published by Universal) of the Berg Violin Concerto, which will be studied in depth.
Our goal will be to engage compositions, rather than to study particular theories or survey the theoretical literature. We will focus on compositional techniques that students can utilize in their creative work. Students will do a major analytical paper and an in-class presentation on the subject of their paper; topics will be decided in consultation with the instructor.

Music 602: The Interpretation of Theoretical Treatises, Cristle Collins Judd
Thursday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library Marian Anderson seminar room
A consideration of theoretical principles based upon the reading and interpretation of selected treatises.

Music 700: Composition Seminar: Advanced Studies in Rhythm, Jay Reise
Thursday 2-5PM, Music Bldg Room 208
Composition employing advanced rhythmic techniques and analysis of selected relevant works.

Music 705: Improvisation in Cross Cultural Perspective, Eric Charry, Visiting Professor from Wesleyan University
Monday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library Marian Anderson seminar room
This course will explore musical composition around the world from a variety of theoretical and practical perspectives. Readings on theories of improvisational processes, as well as on specific musical traditions on various parts of the world, will combine with practical transcription and analysis projects. Classes will consist of a combination of discussion of the readings and student presentations. Topics include: General Theories of Improvisation, Orality and Literacy, Asian Modal Systems, Tonal and Post-Tonal Systems, and Rhythmic Theories.

Music 750: Body and Soul in Chopin's Nocturnes and Mazurkas, Jeffrey Kallberg
Wednesday 2-5PM, Van Pelt Library Marian Anderson seminar room
An exploration of historical concepts of materiality and immateriality as they impinged on the understanding of Chopin's nocturnes and mazurkas. Students who do not own scores of the complete nocturnes and mazurkas are asked to purchase them before the first meeting of the seminar. In descending order of excellence, I would recommend the following editions:
New Polish National Edition, ed. Jan Ekier (expensive)
Universal Edition, ed. Ekier (Nocturnes only)
Breitkopf Gesamtausgabe from 1880s (= Lea Pocket Score edition in modern format)
Henle Edition
"Paderewski" Edition (= Dover Reprint)
Stay away from anything that Schirmer or Peters has thus far published.

Music 780: Studies in Music Theory & Analysis, Eugene Narmour
Tuesday 2-5PM, Music Bldg Room 208
This course examines theories and methods for the scholarly study of applied musical performance in the context of perceived affect, emotion, and aesthetics.

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