Music 750-751 "Resources and Methods of Musicology"

MUSC 750, Fall Semester 2009
Prof. Woerner

Using Musical Information
Prof. Vandermeer

This module will introduce students to the structure of musical information and its relationship to musical scholarship. Issues to be discussed include: musical information; what constitutes a musical text; the idea of libraries, archives, and special collections as repositories of information; unique aspects of music libraries; information about music, including basic music reference tools and the most efficient ways of finding information; the idea of music bibliography; musical technologies including basics of printing and publishing; the difference between primary and secondary source materials; what librarians can do for musicologists; and how musicology interacts with the larger world of information. The module will balance theoretical knowledge through readings with in-class presentations and an extended practical assignment (“treasure hunt”).


Methods of Archival Research: Manuscript Materials at the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna, Austria 
Prof. Neff

This module will introduce incoming students to the general problems and issues in archival research and study. The course first will focus on a recent text addressing general topics related to working at an archive: A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches edited by Patricia Hall and Friedemann Sallis (Cambridge, 2004). Classes will next consider particular manuscript materials offered at the website of the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, the largest digital archive on a single composer in the world. Classes will focus on the materials of two of Schoenberg’s works: the song Lockung op. 6, No. 7, and the Second String Quartet, Op. 10.


An Introduction to Archival Research in Popular Music and Culture
Prof. Garcia

This unit will introduce students to archival research methods in popular music and culture by utilizing UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection, one of the nation’s foremost archival resources for the study of American folk music and popular culture. Students will conduct individual research on a specific collection using the SFC’s finding aids and databases. Topics of discussion will include the varied types of materials in collections, and the problems these materials present to critical scholarship on music and culture. By the end of this module, students should feel well equipped to conduct further research using collections and other archival materials at archives relevant to her/his research interests.

MUSC 751, Spring Semester 2010
Prof. MacNeil

Assessing medieval manuscripts
Prof. Hana Vlhova-Woerner

During this short session, we will try to identify a fragment of a medieval music source (type of the manuscript, dating and provenance, the repertory) in order to decide whether or not to buy it for our Music Library.

UNC Special Collections Conservation Laboratory
Conservator Jan Paris

The Special Collections Conservation Laboratory is responsible for the care and treatment of rare books, manuscripts, posters, maps, and other materials in the University Library's Special Collections. Working collaboratively with curators and departmental liaisons, the Library's Conservator and Assistant Conservator, participate in short- and long-range planning for conservation, digitization, and exhibition of materials in the Rare Book Collection, Manuscripts Department, and North Carolina Collection

Binder Volumes and the Consumption of Sheet Music
in Antebellum North Carolina
Prof. Jon Finson

Among its treasured holdings, the Music Library at UNC-Chapel Hill counts an extensive collection of “binder volumes,” most dating before or during the Civil War. In such volumes purchasers of sheet music had their collection bound for preservation and convenience of use. We will focus on collections with identifiable owners (mostly featuring songs) for what they reveal about patterns of taste in and consumption of popular music during the period from around 1825 to 1865 in the mid-Atlantic region.

Reconstructing Community Context: A Case Study in the Archive
Prof. Brigid Cohen

The history of modernism has often been told as a narrative of individual composers, works, techniques, and styles.  This unit considers how our understanding of modernist musical practices and cultural politics is altered by interpreting them through the lens of their interdisciplinary communities.  Toward this end, we will focus on Black Mountain College as a case study in contestatory modernist community life.  Founded as a progressive-era experiment in liberal arts education, Black Mountain College served as a hotbed of experimentation in the arts from 1933 to 1957.  Drawing from archival materials at the North Carolina State Archives, we will interpret the often messy institutional settings and collaborative relationships through which musicians, visual artists, writers, and dancers formulated aesthetic and political positions that responded to the perceived imperatives of their times.  Students will select individual items in the archive on which to focus their investigations of modernist community practices and creation.  Finally, we will present our findings and bring them to bear on existing modernism theory and historiography.  Readings will include literature from modernism theory and historiography, primary and secondary sources on Black Mountain College and related circles, and theories of musical community.

Renaissance Paleography and Notation
Prof. Anne MacNeil

One of the fundamental skills necessary to the study of music history is deciphering hand-written records. In this module, we will learn the basic techniques of paleography by examining a variety of documents from Renaissance Italy, including letters, ambassadorial reports, payment records, music manuscripts, and printed scores.

Music Editions
Prof. John Nádas

This module will serve as an introduction to editing music -- the history and methods of editions of the Western canon -- engaging students in problems and challenges associated with making editions of music from various periods of music history.  In the process, students will have an opportunity to study how the best of editorial practices have taken account of primary sources in interrogating music manuscripts and prints and in exploring individual composers’ compositional procedures. Paramount in class discussions will be a consistent focus on what in fact can be considered critical about editing music.