Music History

This course will offer an introduction to the history of Western art music from antiquity to the present. The main activities will be focused on listening attentively and creatively to many musical compositions that show the development of genres and styles of classical music over 2,000 years and on creating a language to discuss our experiences and insights. We will learn about the various elements of musical structures and how they combine to create each work. We will also study the historical and societal contexts of those compositions and see how this knowledge informs our listening and how those pieces can illuminate our understanding of the societies in which they were created. The course will feature regular in-class performances, and we will attend a number of concerts. No prior musical knowledge, such as reading of musical scores or music theory background, is required (though it can be utilized in conference work). While the main emphasis of the seminar will be on Western classical music, music that students choose to study for their conference work can also be drawn from popular music traditions and non-Western cultures. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

The impact of The Beatles has been immeasurable. In their seven years as a recording band, they explored and enlarged every aspect of songwriting technique, producing one musical milestone after the next. This course will trace the development of The Beatles chronologically through their 12 original English albums and the singles that were released alongside them. We will focus on the ways in which The Beatles used harmony, phrase structure, rhythm, structural ambiguity, and sonority in continuously innovative ways. We will also look at some of the musical styles and cultural phenomena that The Beatles assimilated and transformed—from early rock & roll, Motown, and The Goon Show to 1960s counterculture—and explore how The Beatles, in turn, influenced music and culture in the 1960s. There will also be guest-led discussions by other members of the music faculty on the following topics: The Beatles and the evolution of studio recording, the use of electronic music techniques (Yannelli), Norwegian Wood and the great sitar explosion (Higgins), electric guitar techniques (Alexander), and acoustic guitar techniques (Anderson).

This course will examine how music and its global circulation make the relationships between people audible. In the social contexts of listening and musical performance, we will understand how music and its movement across community-based, regional, and national boundaries shape people’s lives. As recordings, musicians, and ideas about music move, we will learn how they sound interpersonal relationships by using selected ethnographic examples of art and popular music from across Asia. Class topics may include Javanese gamelan, South Indian classical music, Japanese taiko, Southeast Asian heavy metal, Iranian pop, brass bands, Japanese hip hop, Bollywood, music from the Silk Road Project, world jazz, Japanese noise, K-pop, the music of M.I.A., World Music 2.0, and others. Course themes related to the circulation of music will include the ideology of tradition, cultural imperialism, sound technologies, and the more recent proliferation of cultural nationalisms that seek to impede circulation. By encountering musical diversity through listening and reading materials, students will develop the critical thinking skills to make connections between sonic and textual resources and to better understand the many ways in which music and sound are meaningful around the world. Participation in Solkattu, our Indian vocal percussion ensemble, or African Classics, our African popular music ensemble, is strongly encouraged. No prior musical experience is necessary.

The goal of this course is to recapitulate an experience had by the instructor, having attended a visual-arts museum that had its 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. Thus, in this course, every class will begin with some concept from mathematics, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, and more; then, we will gradually explore music that engages with that concept in some way. The musical examples each week will span centuries and cultures—one week might have an avant-garde piano sonata by Boulez, a 1980s 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. Per the course title, it is not everything exactly—and it is more like “across the semester” rather than “all at once”—but, by the end, students 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.

This course will examine punk rock as a musical style and as a vehicle for cultural opposition. We will investigate the musical, cultural, and political conditions that gave birth to the genre in the 1970s and trace its continuing evolution through the early 2000s—in dialogue with and opposition to other musical genres, such as progressive rock, heavy metal, ska, and reggae. We will begin with the influence of minimalism on “proto-punk” artists like the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, which will provide a foundation for seeing how minimalism—as well as modernism, atonality, and electronic music—continue to resonate in punk and rock music. We will examine the intellectual background of early UK punk, with readings by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and look at the theories of Gramsci and Foucault on the question of institutional power structures and the possibility of resistance to them. To deepen our understanding of punk style and the culture of opposition, there will also be readings by Theodor Adorno, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Julia Kristeva, and others. We will trace the splintering of punk into various subgenres and the challenges of negotiating the music industry while remaining “authentic” in a commercialized culture. Another major focus will be on the Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s as a catalyst for third-wave feminism. Given the DIY aesthetic at the heart of punk and in addition to listening to, analyzing, and reading about the music, students who want to incorporate creative work will be given the opportunity to work with musicians and write some punk songs. In light of the abundant documentary film footage relating to punk culture, the course will include a film viewing every other week.

This course will look at the intersections of music, culture, and nature. We will study how artists and musicians use music and sound to address climate change by surveying important trends in the young field of ecomusicology, such as soundscape studies, environmental musical criticism, acoustic ecology, and animal musicalities. Themes will range from music versus sound and the cultural construction of nature to aurality and the efficacy of sonic activism. Class sessions may include Appalachian coal-mining songs, Indigenous music from the Arctic, art music composition, soundscapes, field recordings, birdsong, soundwalks, and musical responses to environmental crises such as Hurricane Katrina and the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan. Participation in the Solkattu Ensemble (Indian vocal percussion) is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

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.