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UNC, Library of Congress launch summer music fellowships Three graduate students in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will research the music of composer Samuel Barber during World War II, the National Negro Opera Company and the 1975 musical “Chicago” with new summer fellowships at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Musicologist and anthropologist awarded summer NEH fellowships Music professor Annegret Fauser and anthropology professor Lorraine Aragon in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences have been awarded $6,000 fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the summer of 2008.
Announcing the 2008 Kenan Music Scholars! Three instrumentalists and a vocalist have been named the second class of Kenan Music Scholars, receiving full scholarships in music to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Spring 2007

by admin-oasis — last modified 2007-05-14 16:11

Music 950: Seminar in Musicology

Systems of Musical Patronage in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

Prof. John Nádas

The seminar will investigate and contextualize types and functions of musical patronage that developed during the period 1400-1600, focusing on the major kinds of institutions in France, Burgundy, the Hapsburg Empire, and Italian city states that supported high art music: city, church, and court.  A comparative approach will inspire going beyond the mere study of a string of individual chapels or specific works, highlighting instead constants and variables across institutional barriers that should allow for broader traditional and innovative patterns to emerge.

Recent writings from a range of historical disciplines on courtly, civic, and ecclesiastical cultures will function as points of departure from which to study such patterns. Group projects and individual presentations and papers will be directed toward critical assessments of why and how these institutions and their musical repertoires contributed to shaping and promoting specific – and frequently overlapping – identities for churchmen, princes, and city governments. In so doing, musical patronage will be seen to have played a significant role in defining the cultural paradigms of the era.

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Music 850

Proseminar in Musicology: Opera and the Ancient World

Prof. Anne MacNeil

Many operas, over the history of the genre, set epic tales of ancient Greece and Rome. In this seminar, we will examine the durability of these narratives and the musical forms, genres, and styles that support them. Readings will include Classical authors such as Ovid, Virgil, and Homer, as well as current scholarship on narrativity and multimedia analysis. Each student should select an opera to be the focus of his or her work over the course of the semester—weekly discussions will center on a conceptual issue and its varying applications in the chosen operas. Students should expect to lead seminar discussions and to write one analytical paper.

 When selecting an opera, consider settings of the stories of Orpheus, Eurydice, Ulysses/Odysseus, Penelope, Dido, Aeneas, Paris, Helen, Achilles, Medea, Jason, Acis, Galatea, Hercules, Elektra, Orestes, Clytemnestra, Agammemnon, and the Trojan Wars. Whether you choose Monteverdi or Offenbach, Handel or Berlioz, Cavalli or Strauss, historical era is not an issue: expand your mind by selecting an opera from a music-historical period you don’t know very well, or deepen your understanding of the genre by choosing an opera that seems to embody critical compositional ideals.

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Music 870: Proseminar in Ethnomusicology

Music, Technology, and Culture

Prof. Mark Katz

This seminar will investigate the profound influence of sound recording on the musical life of the world since the early 1900s.  After an introductory unit in which we will develop a framework for understanding technological influence, the course will proceed through a series of case studies that focus on particular styles or genres, regions, and technologies.  In the final unit, the students will preside, presenting their research on the intersections of music, technology, and culture.
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