Graduate Seminars:

Music 101/102: Research and Methods in Musicology (Fall 02; Spring 05)

Introduction to the scope, methodology, and bibliography of musicology. Extensive use of the music library, preparation for advanced seminars, and proper research procedures are stressed.

Music 337: Microcosm/Macrocosm: The 1889 Exposition Universelle and Musical Life in fin-de-siecle Paris (Fall 01)

Debussy’s visit to the 1889 Exposition Universelle has become famous as an inspirational turning-point in the history of French, if not Western, "modern" music. But the 1889 exhibition had wider ramifications for music in France than is generally acknowledged. Musical performances and political aspirations at this World's Fair contributed to the patriotic and colonialist projects of a nation which was at the point of breaking out of its international isolation to join new European political alliances while reviving its economy after two decades of decline. The 1889 Exposition Universelle was, more than any other French World's Fair, defined through its political context, given the fact that it celebrated the centenary of the French Revolution. It aimed to be—in the words of the 1889 Guide bleu—a "gigantic encyclopaedia, in which nothing was forgotten." Furthermore, the Fair created a microcosm within the macrocosm of Paris, a city which at that time truly justified Walter Benjamin’s designation of "Capital of the Nineteenth Century." The Exposition Universelle thus offers a fascinating case-study not only for the study of music and its consumption within a specific cultural environment, but also for the assessment of recent methodologies as tools for musicological study, including micro-history, cultural studies, gender studies, urban anthropology and colonial studies.

Music 337: Dancing in the Paris Opéra (Spring 03)

We will examine ballet in the Paris Opéra from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic (ca 1830 to 1890). We will study both ballet and opera productions, including those in which ballets were added to already existing operas for performance on the stage of the Opéra to suit the convention of the theater (as was the case with Weber's Freischütz,Wagner's Tannhäuser and Bizet's Carmen). Angles of study will include the political, economic and social context of the institution itself, theatrical and musical genres and conventions, specific case studies (reaching from Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable and Adam's Giselle to Massenet's Thaïs), and evaluations of historical and analytical approaches to this repertoire.

Music 337: Wagner and Wagnerism: Critical and Compositional Reception (Fall 04)

In this seminar, we will be examining the critical and compositional reception of Richard Wagner's works and writings. The first part of the semester will be dedicated to the critical reception of Wagner's works and ideas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part of the semester will focus on the compositional reception of Wagner in works (among others) by Ernest Chausson, Claude Debussy, Jules Massenet, Giacomo Puccini, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Richard Strauss.

Music 850: Music, Gender, Sexuality (Fall 06)

In this proseminar we will explore literature addressing the by now ubiquitous topics of gender and sexuality in music. It will be a reading-intensive course in which you will familiarize yourselves with the theories and discourses of women’s studies, feminist literature, gender and queer studies, and theories of performativity, including—in the field of musicology—the writings of Philip Brett, Marcia Citron, Suzanne Cusick, Bruce Holsinger, Susan McClary, Mitchell Morris, Martha Mockus, and Ruth Solie. The readings will offer a historical perspective on the discussions while incorporating current literature on these topics.

Undergraduate Courses:

Music 148/WMST 148: Introduction ot Women and Music (Spring 05)

Throughout the world, women were and are active as composers, performers, publishers, patrons, priestesses, composition and instrumental teachers, concertgoers, concert organizers, musicologists and amateur musicians. Theirs is a rich and diverse contribution to musical culture in societies across the globe, from Japanese dance to the French salon. Yet, their career possibilities and public perception were different from their male counterparts - in their times and today. Discourses differ according to gender, sexuality and race, and women themselves often engage consciously with horizons of expectation when locating themselves within the worlds of music. In this course, women's music-making will be investigated from three different angles: (1) a global perspective on women's roles as musicians in society, exploring their various roles through case studies from a diversity of cultures such as India, Eastern Europe, and Egypt; (2) a longitudinal cross-section through one specific culture (Western art music) to explore how historical developments shaped women's place in music; (3) a study of contemporary popular music in America (Rock, Jazz, Country, Pop, and Latin) to raise awareness to gender issues in the students' own musical contexts.

Music 53/253: Music History after 1850 (Spring 02; Spring 05; Spring 06)

The course aims to offer a broad picture of music-making from the mid-nineteenth century to this present day, reaching from Wagner's music dramas and Brahms's symphonies to Stravinsky's ballets, Cage's aleatoric works, Boulez's structuralist compositions and recent developments in electroacoustic music. The music covered in this course will be mainly what is termed 'Western art music', but some reference will be made to Jazz, popular music and film music.

Music 55: An Evening in Versailles: Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) and Her Music (Fall 03)

The seminar will work towards the preparation of a stage production evolving around the French Baroque composer Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. The following topics will be covered in the seminar: the culture and musical repertoire of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in France; Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre's career and works; performance practice; writing and preparation of the stage production; rehearsal logs and performance.

Music 85/285: Musical Modernism (Fall 01; Fall 03; Fall 06)

Modernism will be examined in its broadest terms as a cultural current of the first part of the twentieth century (ca 1890 to 1940). Music will be studied as a form of artistic expression in relationship to other arts such as painting, literature, architecture, dance, stage production, and film. Like other terms indicating a "new art" (such as ars nova or le nuove musiche), modernism designates an aesthetic approach rather than the advent of radically different artistic developments. Thus the course will address the aesthetic debates on the one hand and the specific artistic products on the other, emphasizing the pluralism of styles which reach from Dada and Expressionism to Futurism and Neoclassicism. Artists covered will include, for example, Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Kurt Weill, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Aaron Copland.

Music 86: Music as Culture: The Parisian Salon, 1680-1914 (Fall 02)

In this course, we will explore the salon as musical and cultural institution from the ancien régime to the beginning of World War I. Salons played a central role in the cultural and political life of France. By examining the institution and its cultural work through music, we will be studying both the way in which contexts influence the creation of art and how art can act as an agent of culture within this framework and beyond. We will also examine in which ways the salon offered women an (albeit limited) space within which they were able participate in the cultural and political developments of France, and how the institution of the salon was appropriated by groups such as poets and journalists to create a space for discussion and creation that could escape public control and state censorship.

Music 86-2: Music as Culture: Carmen—Transformations of a Heroine (Spring 03)

Few literary and operatic heroines have made their mark on Western culture in a way comparable to Carmen. She developed from the seductress in a novella by Prosper Mérimée in the 1830s to an operatic heroine in Bizet's opera in 1875. After a slow start in the 1880s, Bizet's Carmen soon became one of the most frequently performed compositions of the entire operatic repertoire. Opera and novella found their way into film and television as well as into artistic re-workings all over the world, for example Carmen Jones (1954) or—most recently—Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001). In this course, we will chart the transformations, from Mérimée's novella on, of Carmen and the other characters, and we will ask how these re-readings reflect social, political and aesthetic concerns of their time and environment, in particular as regards issues of gender, race and class. We will address these questions through close readings of the novella, opera, and films. (You do not need to read music, but you should be prepared to listen to it.) At the same time, Carmen will serve as a case study for interdisciplinary engagement with works of art and will allow us to ask questions about reception, appropriation and intertextuality, with adaptations reaching from big-budget film (Rosi) to popular culture (MTV). At the end of this class, you should not only know these pieces, but you should be able to evaluate the artifacts in relation to the contexts of their creation.

Music 89: French Women Musicians, 1500-2001 (Spring 02)

This course aims to show how women's music-making is embedded in the culture of French society through the past five centuries, studying both long-term developments and specific topics such as the court of Catharine de Medici, convents, Enlightenment and nineteenth-century salons, the opera house, the bourgeois home, the music hall, and the twentieth-century concert hall. The course will address women's music-making on both amateur and professional levels, and we will study women's activities as composers, musicians, patrons, educators and public.