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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
The 20th century opened with a startling emancipation of sonic phenomena that had been carefully prohibited for centuries. For the next several decades, each move toward abstraction, structural rigor, and complexity was countered by another move toward populism, accessibility, and musical vernacular. The paradox of the century was that musical progressivism and political progressivism did not go hand in hand, but were often opposed: for example, Americans with communist sympathies favored folk-tune-based symphonies for the masses, while Soviet composers had a similar ideology imposed from above. This course looks at the century's "classical?usic from a political viewpoint, focusing on arguments made by Schoenberg, Cage, Babbitt, Cardew, and many other composer protagonists.
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4.00 Credits
Anthropology This course introduces students to the history, scope of subject matter, theory, and methodology of ethnomusicology, which is the study of music in relation to other aspects of culture (i.e., language, religion, politics, social organization). Students examine how ethnomusicology has developed over the last half-century in connection with various understandings of what "culture"is and with music's position within these different conceptual frameworks. Also introduced are the main research methodologies, borrowed from anthropology, of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation.
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4.00 Credits
Anthropology, SRE This course provides practical instruction in field research and analytical methods in ethnomusicology. Topics include research design; grantsmanship; fieldwork; participant observation; writing of field notes, interviews, and oral histories; survey instruments; textual analysis; audiovisual methods; archiving; performance as methodology; historical research; and the poetics, ethics, and politics of cultural representation. Students conceive, design, and carry out a limited research project over the course of a semester. They also write up a grant proposal for a project (this may be the same as the semester project) and defend it in a mock review.
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4.00 Credits
This course analyzes a number of key operas, including several in the standard repertory and others more rarely heard, and addresses general historical, cultural, and aesthetic issues relating to opera in the last 100 years.
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4.00 Credits
Students make a thorough analysis of a maximum of three works from the 19th and 20th centuries. The emphasis is not on harmonic analysis, but on how networks of motives are used to generate overall structure-that is, the essence of large-scale compositional thinking. Students complete individual papers on a work related to the music analyzed in class, which may include Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, Morton Feldman's "Turfan Fragments," and Stravinsky?iano Concerto. Prerequisites: Music 255 or Harmony Workshop and permission of the instructor.
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4.00 Credits
This introduction to the overtone series and the history of tuning teaches how tuning shapes the course of a culture's music; traces the parallel development of music and the number series back 6,000 years, to the teachings of Pythagoras; shows how to discriminate the pitch subtleties that differentiate Indian music, Balinese music, and even the blues from conventional European tuning; analyzes music by American avantgardists such as Glenn Branca, Harry Partch, and La Monte Young; explores the possible uses of music in meditation; and, most important, sensitizes class members to aspects of listening that 20th-century Westerners have been trained to filter out. A basic ability to read music is strongly recommended, but a background in mathematics or acoustics may compensate for its absence.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies, American Studies, SRE This three-part course is a study of the crosspollination between postbop in the late 1950s and free jazz. Employing a cultural approach, it examines the effects on music of the prevailing social climate from 1958 to the mid-1960s. The emphasis is on artists and composers such as Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Horace Silver, and Cecil Taylor.
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4.00 Credits
This course examines the classical music of India, Indonesia, China, Korea, and Japan, and the influence of that music on 20th-century Western music, including the California school of Cage, Cowell, and Harrison; minimalists Glass, Reich, Riley, and Young; and Europeans such as Ligeti, Messiaen, and Xenakis. Westerntrained Asian composers who have reintroduced traditional Asian materials into their work (Tan Dun, Yuji Takahashi, Toru Takemitsu, Chou Wen-chung) are also studied. The most recent developments in intercultural hybridization by younger composers and improvisers (Fred Ho, Jin Hi Kim, Miya Masaoka, Ikue Mori) are studied in the context of a developing integrated world music culture that promises to be a major musical trend in the 21st century.
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4.00 Credits
As the dust begins to settle on the 20th century, the outlines of its musical history emerge more clearly-acknowledged masterpieces, unacknowledged masterpieces, turning points, false starts and roads not taken, fallen idols, and outright flops. This seminar examines an eclectic crosssection of works, under such rubrics asMusic and Painting (Hindemith, Mathis der Maler); Music and Transcendentalism (Ives, "Concord" Sonata);Music and Sex (Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth); Music and Ideology (Brecht-Weill, Mahagonny); Music and Race (Gershwin, Porgy and Bess); Great Incomprehensibles (Carter, Double Concerto); Academic Composers (Babbitt, Philomel, and works by Bard composers); Songs by Bessie Smith and Cole Porter; and Great Flops (Stravinsky, Mavra).
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4.00 Credits
RES Modern Russian culture has a distinctly original character that was shaped initially by the Orthodox Christian tradition passed on from Byzantium. This tradition eventually came into contact and conflict with the flow of West European ideas. The monumental achievements of European civilization were absorbed and confronted, transformed and blended with the unique Russian experience. Russian music followed a similar path. Students explore Russian culture through the medium of Russian opera. The material includes selected literary texts, musical recordings, and opera performances on video. Offered under the auspices of the Bard- Smolny Virtual Campus Project, in cooperation with Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia.
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