MUSI 5400a, Special Topics in Performance Studies: Sounding Dance  Ameera Nimjee and Amanda Reid

This semester’s special topic performance studies is on the space between music and dance; sound and movement. We are motivated by questions like: How is the dance floor a musical one? How is choreography a core creativity in musical performance? How are spaces constructed by sound and how do bodies move through them? Course texts include those that are central to the instructors’ own scholarly research areas, in Caribbean Black and queer performance and South Asian and Muslim performance, respectively. Both instructors consider issues of migration and diaspora centrally, which reflect critical theories of sound-making and movement as bodies navigate geopolitical borders and vernacular structures of power. Students have the opportunity to delve into the specificity of performance methodologies while also benefitting from a series of scholars external to Yale who come to conduct focused talks and workshops on their research between sound and movement through the semester.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

MUSI 5510a, Musical Ethnographies  Ameera Nimjee

Ethnography refers to two things: (1) a research methodology and (2) the resulting text that is written as the published result of this methodology. In this course, we explore a selection of musical ethnographies (texts) that have been written in the past few decades. These are monographs in which scholars center their research on musical performance. These monographs are argumentative and hail from fields in which ethnography is a central research methodology, such as ethnomusicology, anthropology, performance studies, and regional/topical disciplines like South Asian studies, Black studies, etc. Each week focuses on one monograph. Undergraduate students are responsible for reading a considerable selection of the book, while graduate students are expected to have read the entire text before attending class. As the course progresses, students familiarize themselves with various approaches to both field research and the long-form prose that is the ethnographic result. Students also conduct their own ethnographic research to produce ethnographic prose. Key terms used throughout the course include fieldwork, participant observation, viscerality, embodiment, transcription, and various analytics for performance.
Th 9:25am-11:20am

MUSI 6980a, Proseminar: Music Theory  Giulia Accornero and Daniel Walden

A survey of the major works, topics, questions, and techniques of research in the field of music theory as it has developed over the past half-century. We consider the position of the field within the broader contexts of the academy and provide a bibliographic foundation for further work in the field.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

MUSI 7010a, Music Notation and/as Theory  Ian Quinn and AZ (A. Zayaruznaya)

This course examines the sites of contact and overlap between music theory and music notation. By “music notation” we mean both written and unwritten mnemonic support technologies such as the neumes that inscribe medieval European plainchant or the vocables that instantiate South Asian musical grammars. By “music theory” we mean not only explicit knowledge of music transmitted through written treatises but also implicit knowledge shaped by musical notations and other forms of what Thomas Christensen calls the “fragile texts” of “hidden theory.” Although they are often treated separately,  theory and notation can to some extent be co-constitutive: notational systems embed conceptual structures, and various modes of theorizing illuminate the cognitive affordances of the human musical mind, which acts as both a storage medium and a performer. Attending to these sites of overlap reveals the cultural processes by which notations are transmitted and by which they can influence the theoretical systems built upon them.
W 9:25am-11:20am

MUSI 7130b, Topics in Music, Gender, and Sexuality  Jessica Peritz

This graduate seminar delves into foundational and recent scholarship on the relationships between music and constructions of gender and sexuality. It is not intended as an all-encompassing survey of this topic and its history, but rather as an introduction to some of the innumerable approaches and “objects” of study at the nexus of music, gender, and sexuality. Readings are drawn from work in historical musicology, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, music theory, performance studies, and beyond, and include (but are not limited to) work by such scholars as Suzanne Cusick, Will Cheng, Kara Keeling, Wayne Koestenbaum, Emily Wilbourne, Judy Tsou, Alisha Lola Jones, and Daphne Brooks. To encourage students to read beyond the syllabus, the later weeks of the semester are left open for students to curate their own selections of scholarship for the rest of the class to read together (please note that the scope of this curation will depend on the number of enrolled students). Undergraduates and students outside of the FAS/GSAS may enroll, but only with permission of the instructor.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

MUSI 7200b, History of Theory I  Giulia Accornero

A survey of the history of music theory from Greek antiquity to the Renaissance. Readings are drawn from Aristoxenos, the Sectio canonis, Ptolemy, Boethius, the Musica enchiriadis, Guido of Arezzo, John of Garland, Franco of Cologne, Jehan de Murs, Marchetto of Padua, Philippe de Vitry, Tinctoris, Glarean, Gaffurius, and Zarlino. Topics include systems and scales, tuning, transmission, institutional sites, speculative and practical traditions, methodology, and the scientific status of music theory.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

MUSI 8120a or b, Directed Studies: Ethnomusicology  Jessica Peritz

n/a
HTBA

MUSI 8140a or b, Directed Studies: History of Music  Jessica Peritz

By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA

MUSI 8370a / FILM 8040a, Opera, Media, Technologies  Gundula Kreuzer

Opera has been assigned—and continues to assume—important roles in genealogies of technical media. This seminar explores both what media archaeology and other recent approaches in media studies and science and technology studies hold for an understanding of the nature of opera, and what opera might in turn contribute to a historically expanded perspective on electronic and digital multimedia. Understanding opera as a technical medium will also help address the latest operatic transformations in the digital age. Topics include theoretical discourses on eventness and mediation, strategies of audiovisual immersion, the development of illusionist stage devices, the function of screens, the orchestra as technology, and Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as well as examinations of the medial configurations in various operatic renditions, from the Baroque picture-frame stage to HD broadcasts, from Florentine intermedi to site-specific experiments, from Bayreuth to Zoom opera. Reading knowledge of Western musical notation is helpful but not required of students from outside the Department of Music.
F 9:25am-11:20am

MUSI 9140a or b, Directed Studies: Theory of Music  Jessica Peritz

By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA

MUSI 9980a, Prospectus Workshop  Giulia Accornero

n/a
F 9:25am-11:20am

MUSI 9990b, Dissertation Colloquium  Daniel Walden

n/a
F 9:25am-11:20am