Music History

First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits

MUHS 1023

This course will explore the effects that advancements in technology have had, and are having, on music. We will study the development of musical instruments, the recording studio, the advent of computers and synthesizers, as well as the impact that these areas have on contemporary music. Some of the topics to be covered will include the following: basic elements and fundamentals of music; principles of acoustics as related to music and electronics; an overview of Western and non-Western music including— traditional, classical, jazz, rock, and pop, as well as music for other media such as dance, film, and theatre. Some other questions to be considered are: How are composers and performers inspired by new developments in instrument making and technology? How has technology changed the course of music for the listener (i.e. streaming vs. physical media)? What effect does technology have on music education? How does or will artificial intelligence (AI) affect the future of music? Students will select conference projects based on their particular interests and from a variety of perspectives, including but not limited to: world history, pioneers of music technology (with an emphasis on female artists and inventors), musical genre, specific periods of music history, types of instruments, and developments in technology. Course work will include reading and listening assignments, discussions, electronic and recording-studio demonstrations, guest lectures, and concert attendance. No previous musical training is necessary. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• John Yannelli

Open, Large seminar—Fall | 3 credits

MUHS 3164

Note: May be counted as humanities credit as MUHS 3164 or music component as MUSC 5254.

The impact of The Beatles has been immeasurable. In their seven years as an international touring and recording band, they explored and enlarged every aspect of song-writing technique, producing musical milestones with almost every album. This course will trace the development of The Beatles chronologically and will focus on the ways the Beatles used harmony, phrase structure, rhythm, structural ambiguity, sonority and production techniques in continuously innovative and beautiful ways. The background to this course will be the political events and social transformations of the 1960s, as well as the musical styles and cultural phenomena that The Beatles assimilated and transformed. No previous musical training or experience is required.

Faculty

• Martin Goldray

Open, Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

MUHS 2035

Note: May be counted for either humanities or social science credits as MUHS 2035 or music component as MUSC 5274. Students must designate the MUHS 2035 area of study (humanities or social science) with the Registrar’s Office at course registration.

How do we listen to unfamiliar music? What ideas, principles, and ideologies influence how we hear? What do the sounds of music tell us about society? This course will explore the practice of music theory and the search for musical meaning, with examples from around the world. We will describe unfamiliar music and then understand it using various approaches to translate its meaning. Course themes will include musical and cultural differences, the relativism of musical perception, structuralist approaches to music theory, the politics of representation, decolonizing music history, and others. Course units will draw from varied ethnographic case studies from ethnomusicology and anthropology and may include examples from India, Indonesia, China, East Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Participation in the Balinese Gamelan Angklung Chandra Buana, an Indonesian tonal percussion ensemble, is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

Open, Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

MUHS 2040

Note: May be counted as humanities credit as MUHS 2040 or music component as MUSC 5276.

A while ago, I went to a visual arts museum, and they had their collection displayed in an unusual fashion. Instead of grouping art in rooms according to genre, chronology, nationality or particular artists, the art was arranged by intriguing concepts. A room might contain an O’Keeffe painting, a centuries-old indigenous piece from Australia, a Rodin sculpture, and a poem that were, in some way, connected by a fascinating idea. I want to recapitulate something like this experience. Every class session will begin with some concept from mathematics, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, and more; then we will gradually explore different music that engages with that concept in some way. The musical examples every week will span centuries and cultures—one week might have an avant-garde piano sonata by Boulez, a 1980's art-rock song by Laurie Anderson, and a Kendrick Lamar album; the next week might have an ancient Sumerian song, a piece by Debussy, and a work from the Indian Carnatic tradition. Gradually, more and more connections between the seemingly disparate topics will be revealed. So, okay, it isn’t everything exactly—and it’s more like “across the course of a semester” rather than “all at once”—but, by the end, you will know a whole lot more across a wide range of disciplines. And, most importantly, we will listen to a metric ton of fantastic music.

Faculty

• Patrick Muchmore

Open, Large seminar—Fall | 3 credits

MUHS 3206

Note: May be counted for either humanities credit as MUHS 3206 or music component as MUSC 5238.

In this course, we will study in detail many of the extraordinary and extraordinarily beautiful creations and innovations of the music of the 19th century. We will begin with Beethoven, who at the beginning of the century inspired a new kind of musical experience and listening, and then look at the composers who followed in his footsteps and ask ourselves: What does romanticism mean to them? We will study many different genres, from symphonies to operas, art songs, piano pieces, and chamber music. This is not a survey class but rather one in which we will take selected seminal works and use the study of those to understand topics such as how music and literature inspire each other in the songs of Schubert and Schumann, how the persona of the composer becomes part of musical discourse in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, the role and rhetoric of nationalism in piano works of Chopin and Liszt, how narrative becomes a crucial ingredient in Mahler’s symphony, how exoticism is a key ingredient in Bizet’s opera Carmen, and how Wagner and Mussorgsky created all-encompassing world visions in their musical dramas. This course has no conferences, but will feature some group activities in addition to the class meetings and assignments. No prior music study is required.

Faculty

• Carsten Schmidt

Open, Large seminar—Year | 3 credits

MUHS 3207

Note: May be counted for either humanities credit as MUHS 3207 or music component as MUSC 5207. Closed to students who have taken Jazz History (MUSC 5250).

Jazz music of all styles and periods will be listened to, analyzed, and discussed. The course will begin with a study in the history of slavery that began in 1619 in the United States. Time will be spent on understanding what led to two unique American art forms of music, blues and jazz, that are related but early on take separate and very different paths. Skills in listening to and enjoying some of the finer points of the music will be enhanced by the study of elements such as rhythm, form, melody, timbre, phrasing, instrumentation, instrumental technique, style, and one of the most important and defining elements of the music, improvisation. We will initially discover and listen to music in a chronological order so as to clearly understand the developments of the music through time. Once the foundational elements of this music have been studied and established, special emphasis will be placed on the development of modern jazz and its relationship to older styles. Some topics to be studied: Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, roots and development of the Big Band Sound, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, lineage of pianists, horn players, evolution of the rhythm section, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, bebop, cool jazz, jazz of the 1960s and 1970s, fusion and jazz-rock, jazz of the 1980s, and modern trends. The crossover of jazz into other styles of modern music, such as rock and R&B, will be discussed, as will the influence that modern concert music and world music has had on jazz styles creating third stream music and more. In the second semester, we will look at the clear and direct influence that jazz had on rock ’n’ roll and groups like The Allman Brothers Band, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Chicago, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and on and on.

Faculty

• Glenn Alexander

Open, Lecture—Spring | 5 credits

MUHS 2161

Note: May be counted for either humanities credits as MUHS 2161 or music component as MUSC 5161.

This course will study David Bowie’s music styles and cultural influences over a career that spanned almost fifty years. The focus will be on how he conveyed through music and lyrics ideas about alienation, isolation, madness, dystopia, gender ambiguity and identity, glamour, role-playing and self-realization, among other things. We will trace how he conveyed those ideas by using elements of German Expressionism, Weimar cabaret, Asian culture, dadaism, surrealism, European art films (by Buñuel, Dalí, Fellini, Dreyer, Bergman, and others), the cut-up technique made popular by William S. Burroughs, commedia dell'arte, English music hall, the Broadway musical, mime, French chanson, blues, soul, Krautrock, minimalism, science fiction, and other things. We will attempt to understand what was more interesting to him than conventional pop stardom, and why he sought an exit from that whenever he achieved it. Singer and songwriter Siouxsie Sioux said that Bowie was an unusual pop star in that he comes with a reading list; we will try to find out what might be on that list and how it might illuminate his career.

Faculty

• Martin Goldray

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

MUHS 3070

Note: May be counted as either humanities or social science credit as MUHS 3070 or music component as MUSC 5277. Students must designate the MUHS 3070 area of study (humanities or social science) with the Registrar’s Office at course registration.

How do human voices express our basic, most fundamental needs and desires? How do our voices also provoke immediate feelings and responses? And how do voices become ideologies—such as having or silencing a voice—that then shape the meanings of our voices? In this seminar, we will use these questions to forge a path towards better understanding the role of the human voice in climate justice. We will begin the course with canonical sources that link music with social justice. Then, we will engage recent research from sound studies, voice studies, media studies, vocal anthropology, ecomusicology, and ethnomusicology that reorients the voice and its sonic elements as a dynamically agentive and transformative force intertwined with history and culture. We will then apply our new understanding of the voice to better describe, analyze, and interpret vocal art that enables us to hear a new relationship with our environment. Throughout the semester, we will index a range of approaches, themes, and persuasive strategies of these activist, vocal interventions addressing climate change in order to articulate and clarify the role of music and sound in climate justice. Class topics and themes may include the speech-song continuum, phonetic variation and prosody, Bollywood playback singing, indigeneity and vocality, vocal mimesis, Tuvan throat singing, multivocality, vocal constructions of place and the environment, and others. No prior experience in music is necessary.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

Open, Lecture—Spring | 5 credits

MUHS 2159

Note: May be counted as humanities credit as MUHS 2159 or music component as MUSC 5223.

We will begin in Babel itself, the ancient site of Babylon, where archaeologists have discovered many tablets about music. Nearby sites have the earliest examples of musical notation, some dating as far back as 1400 BCE. We will learn some aspects of how their music worked and begin building a vocabulary for talking about and notating music in general. Across the course of the semester, we will learn many different musical languages, such as the music of Ancient Greece, the old court music of Japan, drum ensembles of central Africa, and the world of European classical music. We will also delve into many different modern musics, including the rise of sampling and turntablism in hip-hop, the theory of so-called “atonal” music, and the development of electronic sound. In short, the course will be devoted to learning a sampling of crucial aspects of the multitudinous vocabularies and grammars that pervade music across the world and across time. No prior study of nor the ability to read music is required. By the end of the semester, students will be able to read basic musical ideas in a few different notation systems and will have some understanding of important aspects of not only standard European music theories but also many others that are too-often learned only by specialists.

Faculty

• Patrick Muchmore