Music 750-751 "Resources and Methods of Musicology"
MUSC 750 (101) – Fall Semester, 2006
Professors Vandermeer and Garcia
Music Bibliography: The Geographies of Musical
Resources (Prof. Vandermeer)
This module will introduce students to the
structure of musical information and its relationship to musical scholarship.
Specific components include: the idea of libraries as repositories of
information; unique aspects of music libraries; basic music reference tools and
the most efficient ways of finding information; the idea of bibliography;
basics of music 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 with practical assignments.
Historical
Method: Evidence and Explanation (Prof. Bonds)
History includes—but goes well beyond—the
assemblage of relevant evidence. This module will consider various ways of
interrogating sources and developing historical narratives through the critical
examination of notated music (published and unpublished), verbal texts
(manuscript and printed), aural experience (music, spoken word), recorded
sound, and physical objects. Assignments and readings will focus on the
interpretation of specific pieces of evidence, with an eye toward broader
theories of historical method.
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 three of Schoenberg’s works: the Second String Quartet, Op.
10; The Second Chamber Symphony, Op. 38; and the Variations on a Recitative for
organ, Op. 40. Students will do an
8-page paper related to the materials available on the Center’s website.
Close Readings
(Prof. MacNeil)
Close reading describes the careful, sustained interpretation of a text. The technique as practiced today was developed by a group of American critics, most of whom taught at southern universities during the years following the second World War. The so-called New Critics wanted to avoid impressionistic criticism, which risked being shallow and arbitrary. Close reading is now a fundamental method of modern criticism in all fields.
Close reading places emphasis on the particular over the general, paying rigorous attention to facts and details about the text. The second step in close reading is interpreting your observations via inductive reasoning: moving from the observation of particular facts and details to a conclusion, or interpretation, based on those observations. This module will focus on the practical application of this method.
Ethnomusicology: Then and Now (Prof. García)
Since its “official” founding in the 1950s ethnomusicology has broadened its scope of research and methods. Once having circumscribed their scope of research to the folk, traditional, and art music of the non-Western world, ethnomusicologists today continue to eschew many of the field’s past limitations to include the study of popular music as well as adopting perspectives from critical theory, race theory, postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic criticism, hermeneutics, and gender studies. This section will trace the trajectory of ethnomusicological scholarship in the United States and focus on some of the topics, issues, and methods that are concerning ethnomusicologists today.
Critical Theories in Musicology (Prof. Fauser)
We will examine how various theoretical concepts have shaped musicological debates in recent decades. The unit will offer a brief introduction into modern and postmodern theories before focusing in more detail on semiology, feminism, Marxism, and reception history. We will finish with a short exercise that applies different reading to a piece of music.
Medium and Message? (Prof. Carter)
Musicologists working on manuscripts are accustomed to adopting a range of sophisticated philological and codicological techniques to examine their sources, decipher their contents, and uncover what might lie behind them. When it comes to printed music, however, we tend to be more cavalier, assuming that print somehow fixes a text such that we need not worry about its status and therefore can focus on more interesting musical and other concerns. In effect, we ignore the medium in favor of the message.
A
series of case-studies looking at various musical prints from the sixteenth
century to the twentieth, and the notations that they convey, will demonstrate
that this is a wholly erroneous view. Central to our exercise will be the
notions: (a) that print (and musical notation) are not neutral but set
constraints upon what a composer might do; (b) that even if the sources upon
which a music print is based may be lost, one can find ghostly traces of them
within the print itself; and therefore (c) that medium and message become
inextricably intertwined. My aim is to offer a new way of interrogating musical
sources of whatever kind so as better to understand and evaluate their
structure, content, and purpose.
Without Keeping
Score: Music Theorists and Popular Music (Prof. Neal)
In the past fifteen years, music
theorists have approached the analysis of popular music from provocative and
polemic stances. During this unit, we will read significant articles on the
analysis of popular music, address the theoretical tools and models with which
analysts work, and undertake examination of several pieces from different
contemporary genres. We will also
discuss how these approaches are situated in the larger field of contemporary
music theory. Comparisons of different
methodological approaches will yield an understanding of the developments in
the field in the past decade as well as practical skills we can apply to
interpret popular music in meaningful ways.