MUS 520: Topics in Music from 1600 to 1800: Women and Music in Seicento Venice: Barbara Strozzi
The seminar focuses on the seventeenth-century composer and Barbara Strozzi, whose eight published volumes of music fully exploit the expressive potential of mid-seventeenth century music. The adopted (and perhaps illegitimate) daughter of Giulio Strozzi, Barbara was renowned as a singer for her performances in Venetian academic circles associated with her father. MUS 520 explores Strozzi’s music and life in early modern Venice; her relationship to other composers and “exceptional” female artists; early modern academies and contemporary views about gender and sexuality; performance practice and editing.
MUS 542: Instrumentation and Performance
Collaborations with varied ensembles and performers from around the world and here at Princeton, presented in concert on the Princeton Sound Kitchen concert series.
MUS 537: Points of Focus in 20th-Century Music
Seminar on extended just intonation and various nonstandard temperaments. We will review the necessary mathematics involved in interval calculations and cent-ratio conversion. Two notational systems will be introduced: Ben Johnston and HEJI (Extended Helmholtz-Ellis Just Intonation). We will learn how to set up microtonal notation/playback system in Dorico and compose music inspired by our expanded awareness of pitch resources. We will investigate limits of precision that can be expected in performance. In addition to composition and ear-training, we will also conduct in-depth analyses.
MUS 545: Contexts of Composition: Composing Fast
In this class we think about what it means to develop a musical style: the techniques and habits that make us who we are. To force us to think about this issue, we try the experiment of composing very, very quickly — in real time or close to it. We also study a few examples of earlier composers who developed distinctive musical styles.
MUS 561: Music Cognition Lab
Under the direction of a faculty member, and in collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of students, visitors, and postdocs, the student carries out a one-semester research project chosen jointly by the student and the faculty. Open to any graduate student in Music, this course provides a hands-on opportunity to learn the tools, skills, methods, and perspectives of music cognition research.
MUS 534: Ends and Means: Issues in Composition
Seminar examines music as a response to culture. We analyze music from around the world that stands as guides for the social and political ethos of their time, and examines the methodologies that contributed to their becoming iconic echo-locators of history. From West-African Highlife and American protest songs, to folkloric music of Haiti and Brazilian Tropicália, we examine the crossroads of musical form, function and identity. We analyze music-making through an inclusive lens of sonic ecology, and compose music that is explicitly reflective of our time. Course serves as a forum for discussion, collaboration, and discovery.
MUS 532: Composition
Emphasis is placed upon the individual student’s original work and upon the study and discussion of pieces pertinent to that work.
MUS 528: Seminar in Musicology: Introduction to Textual Criticism
Introduction to textual criticism, as method and as theory. The focus is not primarily on the reconstruction of Urtexts, but rather on the workings of textual culture at different times and different places. The conventional stemmatic approach seems to work well for Renaissance polyphony. Yet it breaks down in the transmission of, for example, organum purum, Vitry’s Ars nova, Docta sanctorum, and the work of editors in printing houses. This invites critical reflection on issues like authorial revision, units of transmission, orality, corruption and contamination, editorial change, standards of scribal professionalism, and so on.
MUS 527: Seminar in Musicology: Music of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance
The twelfth century witnessed an effusion of new musical styles and creative practices, stimulated by societal changes that have been controversially dubbed a “Renaissance.” We examine the century’s available expressive idioms against this dynamic socio-historical context (the rise of urbanism, universities, and religious orders and the waning of older, feudal modes of life). Topics include: vernacular lyric song in Arabic, Hebrew, Provençal, and English; settings of Latin verse; Parisian polyphony; liturgical composition; the works of Beatrice de Die, Hildegard of Bingen, St Godric, Adam of St Victor, and Peter Abelard.
MUS 514: Topics in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Music: Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons: He was not a suffering melancholic; he did not write music about death in anticipation of his own; his music was not about his life, although his music has been reduced to his life to the detriment of both. This seminar honors the life and works as separate. It relies on archival documents, including unexpurgated letters and diaries, and digs into the political and cultural contexts of his music, both the famous works and the rarities.
MUS 528: Seminar in Musicology: Music and the Human
This seminar examines the place of the “human” in music discourse. While earlier scholarship assumed a definition of music as “humanly organized sound” (Blacking), recent global developments – from social fragmentation to ecological catastrophe – have put pressure on simple characterizations of both humanity and music. This seminar explores theorizations of the musical human from different disciplines and angles, including biosemiosis, anthropology, and Black critical theory. In addition, we consider the music making capacities of non-human species.
MUS 532: Composition
Emphasis is placed upon the individual student’s original work and upon the study and discussion of pieces pertinent to that work.
MUS 534: Ends and Means: Issues in Composition
We investigate the continuity between tone, timbre, and harmony by studying music by various composers who are touched by spectralism (broadly defined as an attitude encompassing a variety of styles that derive pitch materials from acoustical phenomenon). We begin by looking at examples from Unsuk Chin, Jonathan Harvey, Tristan Murail, Kaija Saariaho, and Chiyoko Szlavnics, among others. Our objective is not only to gain fluency with the materials but also to understand how each composer unfolds their musical ideas to achieve a certain level of structural depth.
MUS 542: Instrumentation and Performance
Collaborations with varied ensembles and performers from around the world and here at Princeton, presented in concert on the Princeton Sound Kitchen concert series.
MUS 545: Contexts of Composition: Musical Instruments, Sound, Perception, and Creativity
Through a series of hands-on labs, we look at a range of topics relevant to how we make and conceive of music, including pitch perception, instrument design, log/linear relationships, spectral analysis, synthesis, resonance, physical modeling, and more.
MUS 527: Seminar in Musicology
This class involves an in-depth reading of my manuscript, Tonality: an Owner’s Manual, reading one chapter per week. That book uses geometrical models, corpus study, and schema theory to consider a range of theoretical and analytical issues, including the development of tonal harmony, continuities between modal and tonal styles, the nature of nonharmonic reduction, and hierarchical structure in musical syntax.
MUS 512: Topics in Medieval Music: Charlemagne and the Authentic Antiphonal
It is a well-known problem in Gregorian chant studies that certain concepts (e.g. improvisation, orality, transmission, composition) are so malleable that they can be flexibly interpreted according to what a given theory demands, or what the evidence is hoped to corroborate. In such conditions, theories may lose all semblance of falsifiability, and unwittingly keep it that way by policing the very terms on whose interpretation they depend, or proposing moratoria on discussion. This seminar departs from the position that the problem is partly one of question-framing, and it proceeds by exploring different questions.
MUS 510: Extramural Research Internship
MUS510 is for students in the department who wish to gain experience of central importance to their area of study by working outside of the University capacity. For composition students, this might include working with theater companies, dance troupes, or other relevant organizations. For musicology students this might include archival research or performance. Course objectives and content are determined by student’s adviser in consultation with the external institution. Students submit monthly progress reports including goals and progress to date, and any evaluations received from host institution or published reviews of the final product.
MUS 548: Creative Practice in Cultural Perspective: Cultivating a Humane Arts Practice
The creative arts are often idealized for their virtue and transcendence, for their ability to enrich and inspire us. However, the canon we still study was made possible by various forms of dominance, including racism, misogyny, and imperialism, and even now, artists experience bias and exclusion in our professional community. We cultivate creative thinking about a more just and sustainable arts world, as we live through the pandemic and imagine what lies ahead. Cultivating community within the seminar, we ask, what would a truly humane arts practice look like? Can we even imagine it?
MUS 545: Contexts of Composition: Composing concertos: the individual and the group
This seminar is a follow up to composing for Orchestra and covers some of the same issues of writing for a large conducted ensemble, but now that ensemble shares the stage with a soloist or small group of soloists and the focus is on the relationships between and among the many and the few.
MUS 534: Ends and Means: Issues in Composition
Our focus is on writing new works for percussion quartet, with a level and depth of engagement which resembles So’s process of commissioning major new works. The spring course challenges composers to consider aspects of percussion writing which are peculiar to percussion chamber music, as well as writing etudes for instruments they are less likely to be familiar with such as steel drums. After the semester course, S works individually with each composer to workshop and premiere a new 8-12′ long work for percussion quartet.
MUS 531: Composition
Emphasis is placed upon the individual student’s original work and upon the study and discussion of pieces pertinent to that work.
MUS 527: Seminar in Musicology
Seminar in musicology consists of two distinct six-week modules, one focusing on Music and Digital Culture (with guest speakers) and a second focusing on Francesco Cavalli’s opera La Calisto (1652), considering as well the virtual production being produced this semester by MUS 219 (taught by Wendy Heller). Both units will be continued in the spring semester in MUS 528.
MUS 525: Topics in Music from 1400 to 1600: Polyphonic Mass Composition in Europe,1440-1540
Chronological survey of the changing styles of Mass composition in the period 1450-1550,
beginning with the anonymous English Missa Caput and Petrus de Domarto’s Missa Spiritus
almus, and concluding with the Missa Ecce quam bonum by Jacobus Clemens non Papa.
Focus is almost entirely on scores.