Music 750-751 "Resources and Methods of Musicology"

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sources and developing historical narratives through the critical examination of notated music (published and unpublished), verbal texts (manuscript and printed), aural experience (music, spoken word), recorded sound, and physical objects.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.