Music
Stoeckel Hall, 203.432.2986
http://yalemusic.yale.edu
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
Ian Quinn [F]
Gundula Kreuzer [Sp]
Director of Graduate Studies
Michael Veal (Stoeckel, 203.432.2986, dgs.music@yale.edu)
Professors Ardis Butterfield, Brian Kane, Gundula Kreuzer, Pauline LeVen, Ian Quinn, Braxton Shelley, Gary Tomlinson, Michael Veal, AZ Zayaruznaya
Assistant Professors Giulia Accornero, Ameera Nimjee, Jessica Peritz, Daniel Walden, Lindsay Wright
Fields of Study
Fields include music history, music theory, and ethnomusicology. (Students interested in degrees in performance, conducting, or composition should apply to the Yale School of Music.)
Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Two years of coursework, comprising a minimum of fourteen courses. All students must take the proseminars in ethnomusicology, music history, and music theory. In addition, students in the theory program must take both of the history of theory seminars; students in the music history program must take one history of theory seminar. Students in ethnomusicology can take up to five courses in other departments, and students in music history and music theory can take up to four courses in other departments subject to DGS approval. Consult the Music Graduate Student Handbook for further details specific to each program.
A student must receive at least four Honors grades in departmental seminars in order to proceed to the qualifying examination, administered in August following the second year. Students must also pass a reading examination in two languages other than English before they are admitted to candidacy. The purpose of these language exams is to ensure that students have basic proficiency in important languages of their discipline and/or those languages in which they plan to conduct their research. Third-year students attend a weekly prospectus/dissertation colloquium. Approval of the dissertation prospectus admits a student to candidacy, provided that all other requirements are met. Only students admitted to candidacy can continue into the fourth year of study. Fourth- and fifth-year students attend the dissertation colloquium in the spring terms.
The faculty considers teaching to be essential to the professional preparation of graduate students in Music. Students in Music typically participate in the Teaching Fellows Program in their third, fourth, and sixth years.
Combined Ph.D. Programs
Music and Black Studies
The Department of Music offers, in conjunction with the Department of Black Studies, a combined Ph.D. degree in music and Black studies. For further details, see Black Studies.
Music and Early Modern Studies
The Department of Music offers, in conjunction with the Early Modern Studies Program, a combined Ph.D. in Music and Early Modern Studies. For further details, see Early Modern Studies.
Master’s Degrees
M.Phil. See Degree Requirements under Policies and Regulations.
M.A. Students may apply for a terminal master’s degree in music. For the M.A. degree, students must successfully complete seven courses, at least six of which are seminars given in the department, along with the passing of the style and repertory examination and an examination in one foreign language. Of the six departmental seminars, at least two grades must be Honors; the remaining five grades must average High Pass. Candidates in combined programs will be awarded the M.A. only when the master’s degree requirements for both programs have been met. Doctoral students who withdraw from the Ph.D. program may be eligible to receive the M.A. if they have met the above requirements and have not already received the M.Phil.
Courses
MUSI 5300a / EMST 7300a, The Castrato Jessica Peritz
This mezzanine seminar locates the intriguing, anxiety-inducing figure of the castrato at the nexus of fact and fiction, working to disentangle the historical realities of castrato lives from fantasies (both popular and scholarly) about castrato bodies, voices, and sexualities. Though the practice of castration has a long and complicated global history, the Italian term castrato denotes a particular group of people within that history: the many thousands of Italian boys, mostly from poor families, who were subjected to surgery between 1550 and 1850 with the express purpose of altering their voices for music-making. As the most celebrated performers of vocal music in early modern Europe, castrati were adored, worshipped, and heaped with wealth—but also mocked, shunned, and denied basic human rights. These and other contradictions characterize the castrato’s fraught place within music history, while also resonating across time with twenty-first-century concerns about constructions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and (dis)ability. Each of the seminar’s weekly sessions revolves around a different approach to the castrato, spanning the historical and transhistorical, factual and fantastical, music-oriented and otherwise. Through reading and analyzing an array of primary sources, musical objects, and scholarly literature, we explore how representations of the castrato in any given time and place reveal a much broader network of cultural ideologies at work under the surface. All told, the figure of the castrato helps us understand historical modes of embodiment and music-making, while also raising still-pressing questions about desire, bodily agency, and the limitations of the archive.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm
MUSI 6740a, Musical Amateurs Lindsay Wright
What does a musical amateur sound like? With etymological roots in the Latin amare, amateurism initially referred favorably to someone pursuing an activity for love rather than financial gain. Today, musical amateurs are often understood as those who perform outside of professional settings, receiving little or no compensation for their labor. In other contexts, “amateur” has become a pejorative term for those without substantial skill or talent—as George Bernard Shaw famously put it, “hell is full of musical amateurs.” These definitions, however, barely scratch the surface of amateurism’s complex meanings across musical practices and communities. In this course, we interrogate the shifting role and reputation of the musical amateur, exploring the fluid boundaries between amateur and professional. We also question the relevance of this distinction entirely, considering other ways to understand humans’ motivations for making music—and the standards by which that music is evaluated. Engaging with scholarship across and beyond the music disciplines, we consider how amateurs have provoked conversations around music’s relationship with capitalism, with expertise, with formal education, with pleasure, and with failure.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm
MUSI 6990a, Proseminar: Musicology Jessica Peritz
A historiographical survey of major topics, issues, and techniques of musicological research. We consider the position of musicology in the broader context of historical thought and provide a conceptual foundation for further work in the field.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm
MUSI 7230a / AFAM 7230, Black Music and Social Life in the Digital Episteme Braxton Shelley
Black music’s online life unfolds at the intersection of two kinds of social media: musical sound and technological ecologies. Through exploring this intersection, this seminar brings crucial aspects of both media into relief. In dialogue with work in the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, media studies, visual culture, and philosophy, we analyze remediations of Black music and musicalities on platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook, among others. The seminar engages with the theory of “digital antiphony” as a framework for understanding the modes of creativity that many digital artifacts reveal and the ways of listening that these potentially-viral objects solicit, showing how various notions of musicality shape the experience of Blackness and sociality in the digital episteme.
W 9:25am-11:15am
MUSI 8120a, Directed Studies: Ethnomusicology Michael Veal
n/a
HTBA
MUSI 8140a, Directed Studies: History of Music Michael Veal
By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA
MUSI 8510a, Workshop: Writing About Popular Music, Jazz, and World Music Michael Veal
This seminar is organized as a writing craft workshop in which we will read, critique, and emulate different styles/genres of popular music writing including works of academic scholarship, journalism, biography, and memoir. The goal is to develop facility in different styles of music writing, with the longer-term goal of preparing students for a variety of potential music-writing-based career paths. None.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm
MUSI 9140a, Directed Studies: Theory of Music Michael Veal
By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA
MUSI 9980a, Prospectus Workshop Lindsay Wright
n/a
F 9:25am-11:15am