MUS 524: Collisions
This seminar examines the role of key controversies and debates within music studies over the past few decades. What leads to scholarly confrontation, and what comes out of it? How do bouts of discord shape the field? What makes some scholarly clashes more productive than others? What does the field look like when mapped around its points of highest contention? Readings trace key debates up to their moments of conflagration and out to their eventual consequences. We also consider what might be worth fighting about now and in the future.
MUS 513: Topics in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Music: Abstraction
This semester explores the origins and exploitation of the concept of abstraction in music from circa 1910. There is some discussion of the articulation of the term in the visual arts (Kandinsky, Klee), but the seminar centers on the syntax of the modern, late modern, and after modern periods in 20th century music history. Repertoire discussed includes Schoenberg, Babbitt, and Feldman, and both ‘dissonant’ and ‘consonant’ abstraction.
MUS 545: Contexts of Composition: Process and Intuition
We consider the interaction between compositional intuition and the use of processes, systems and mechanisms, combining analysis, theory, and composition.
MUS 514: Topics in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Music: The Ballets Russes and Ballets Súedois
Examination of works produced by Ballets Russes and Ballets Suédois, with emphasis on dialogue between music and dance in these works, the rivalry between the two companies between 1920 and 1925 (the years the Ballets Suédois operated), and their general contribution to French modernism. Discussions address canonic ballets and their transformations, “deceased” ballets and the potential for reviving them, and “living” ballets (those that have stayed more or less intact since their premieres. History has treated the Ballets Russes repertoire better than that of the Ballets Suédois: Petrushka is accessible as a ballet; La Boîte à Joujoux is not.
MUS 528: Seminar in Musicology: Digital Culture; Early Modern Women and Song
A continuation of MUS 527, this seminar is divided into two modules. The first, taught by Global Scholar Georgina Born (Oxford University) focuses on anthropological and sociological aspects of digital technology; the second module, taught by Wendy Heller, focuses on the composer Barbara Strozzi in the context of seventeenth-century Venice.
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
The seminar includes the following topics: classical piano literature; mechanics and physics of the piano; the precursors of the piano; tuning; the pianists; fingerings, phrasing, and pedals; prepared piano; notation; digital piano and bitKlavier; and contemporary piano literature. We rethink the instrument as a source of vast potential rather than a symbol of obsolescence.
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 512: Topics in Medieval Music: Guillaume de Machaut and the Ars Nova
The Ars Nova of the early 14th c. is a heavily contested in musical scholarship. Among pressing questions are: (1) the almost complete disappearance of musical sources in 1310-1350; (2) the connection between Ars Nova and Ars Antiqua: continuity or rupture? (3) the mysterious figure of Jacobus of Liège, (4) the date of his treatise Speculum musicae, (5) the meaning of the Papal bull Docta sanctorum, (6) the emergence of counterpoint. In the midst of all this, (7) Machaut steps forward, around 1350, with a substantial musical repertoire in a fully-developed new style. Nothing here makes sense. Or does it?
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 534: Ends and Means: Issues in Composition
This seminar focuses on composing for the electric guitar in general and more specifically for the Dither guitar quartet. Dither makes several visits during the course of the term to rehearse sketches and ultimately perform finished works.
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 513: Topics in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Music: Shostakovich and His World
Analysis of the music, career, and cultural context of Dmitri Shostakovich, the leading Soviet composer and the musician most associated with the Stalinist era. The seminar considers the range of influences on his early style, his political misfortunes in the 1930s and 1940s, his pivot from theatrical composition to symphonies and string quartets, the literary sources of his songs, and the challenges of interpreting post-tonal music.
MUS 527: Seminar in Musicology
An Introduction to Ethnomusicology: This seminar introduces participants to the academic study of ethnomusicology by considering and evaluating the last decade of Alan P. Merriam Prize winners.
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 548: Creative Practice in Cultural Perspective: Crossing Cultural Boundaries in the Arts
Appreciation or appropriation? Admiration or exploitation? Does the artist have the necessary expertise? Did they ask permission? This seminar considers questions raised by the crossing of artistic-cultural borders. We consider examples not only of music, but also of music video, opera, fiction, film, and television¿all taking into account participants¿ own interests and concerns. Pushing beyond familiar colloquial ¿scripts,¿ such as the assertion that respectful intentions negate power imbalances, we explore questions of identity, ownership, representation, and authenticity.
MUS 528: Seminar in Musicology: Professional Development
This seminar explores the professional context of work in music studies.
MUS 545: Contexts of Composition: Righting Wrong Notes
The Topic of MUS 534 is “Righting Wrong Notes”. This seminar begins with the notion of ‘blue’ note – pitches that stand out as particularly expressive – and extends to ‘wrongitude’ in other realms more generally. Instead of normalizing perceived outliers as grammatically normative ‘flat seventh,’ ‘part of a referential w,x,y,z tetrachord’, ‘inevitable’ their disruptive nature is celebrated as intentional and a focus of inquiry.
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 520: Topics in Music from 1600 to 1800: J.S. Bach in the Twenty-first Century
How do we listen, analyze, and think about the music of J.S. Bach in the twenty-first century? Bach scholarship, foundational for the development of musicology as a discipline, has long been somewhat conservative, focusing primarily on sources, chronology, performance practice, and biography. This seminar focuses on recent efforts by scholars to ‘rethink’ and ‘rehear’ the music of Bach. The primary text is the forthcoming volume Rethinking Bach, edited by Bettina Varwig, which introduces new trends and allow us to dive deeply into his music. We also explore the many primary sources in the Princeton University Library.
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 512: Topics in Medieval Music: Winchester Polyphony, 850-1100
An examination of the Winchester organa, the most sophisticated examples of the dominant polyphonic tradition from 850 to 1100. This tradition was based on a fundamentally different conception of polyphony than the new (and lasting) tradition that emerged around 1100. Winchester-style polyphony vanished around the same time: it was an evolutionary dead end. The organa used to be regarded as undecipherable, since the voices are written in unheightened neumes. Yet in 1968 Andreas Holschneider published his brilliant discovery of their decipherment. We will transcribe and discuss selected organa along the principles he established.
MUS 527: Seminar in Musicology
How can we understand the momentous changes to music and musical practices worldwide attendant on digitization and digital media? This seminar (co-taught by UCL Professor and Princeton Global Scholar Georgina Born and Gavin Steingo) takes Born’s forthcoming edited volume, Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology, as its point of departure and as a way to begin answering the question. We explore the relationship between music and digital media in a manner at once geographically broad and theoretically cross-disciplinary.
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.