Spring 2009

MUSC 850 Section 1 and Section 2: Proseminar in Musicology
“Under the Covers:  Identity and Interpretation in Popular Music”
Professors Mark Katz and Jocelyn Neal

“Covering” someone else’s song is a longstanding, sometimes revered, and sometimes ridiculed tradition in popular music. By their very nature, cover songs invite comparative study.  What makes a cover different from its model, and how do these changes in sound generate differences in meaning?  How do covers cross—and therefore highlight the boundaries between—genres, styles, eras, and performance traditions?  How do covers stake claims of cultural ownership and reinforce, resist, or complicate existing power relationships?  Cover songs moreover raise questions about authenticity, originality, and ontology; influence and lineage; music industry practices and audience reception.  The purpose of this course is to grapple with these and the many other questions that covers provoke us to ask.

We will begin this course by examining the contradictory definitions and taxonomies of covers in the literature.  The bulk of the semester will be given over to a series of case studies in which cover songs traverse different boundaries, including gender, sexuality, genre, style, political affiliation, race, geography, and various combinations thereof.  These case studies will illuminate the ways in which contemporary popular music relies on its past to construct its present while simultaneously rewriting its own its history, all through the act of interpreting old songs anew. 

Throughout this course we will draw upon tools from ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and music theory, as well as from a variety of disciplines outside music, including cultural theory, history, philosophy, and sociology.

MUSC 930: Seminar in Music Theory
Contemporary Music Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Europe and America
Professor Severine Neff

The seminar will consider the history, aesthetics, and interaction of contemporary music groups and organizations in early twentieth-century Europe and America. Special emphasis will be given to close analytic readings of musical works highly valued by each community or organization. The seminar will progress chronologically, beginning with Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performance in Vienna and Prague (emphasis of works by Busoni and Debussy). It will continue with groups of composers or performers fostering the cult of noise in Europe and America (works by Russolo, Antheil, and Varèse). It will conclude with a comparison of the composers and the aesthetics promoted by organizations in New York and Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s: the International Composer’s Guild (Rudhyar and Casella), the League of Composers (Cowell and Ornstein), Pro Musica (Bauer), and “Evenings on the Roof” (Cowell, Strang, and Cage).

MUSC 950: Seminar in Musicology
Cultural Theory and Music of the Recent Past
Professor Brigid Cohen

Musicological work on late 20^th- and 21^st-century musics has increasingly staked its claims in terms of a range of cultural theories.  This course provides a critical introduction to this scholarship and the charged contemporary debates about music, society, and cultural difference it engages.  Particular attention will be paid to literatures on modernism, postmodernism, post-war cultural politics, globalization, postcolonial studies, popular/elite hierarchies, and gender, sexuality, and other differences.  Theorists and musical thinkers discussed may include Abbate, Adorno, Attinello, Babbitt, Beal, Benjamin, Bhabha, Brody, Cage, Fink, Goehr, Jameson, Jones, Kotz, McClary, Monson, Scherzinger, Shreffler, Slobin, Taruskin, and Willson.  We will examine this literature in tandem with an exploration of specific post-war musical cultures as represented in archival sources, interviews, and other primary documents.