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Graduate Seminars

Spring 2025

Music Historiography and Black Opera

Naomi André

Dr. Naomi André
Tuesday, 2-4:50 pm

This seminar explores the way stories are told and documented. We will focus on how narratives are constructed in the discourse of music history (historiography) as well as on the operatic stage. From what is featured in the mainstream to the hidden activities of communities relegated to the shadows, we will explore how Black experiences, bodies, and voices have been represented in operatic spaces throughout the history of the genre with an emphasis on the nineteenth century to the present. As we are currently in a “Golden Age of Black Opera,” we will also spend time with recent repertory (e.g., Davis/Davis X, Life and Times of Malcolm X; Blanchard/Lemmons, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Giddens/Abels Omar; Tesori/Thompson Blue, Liverman/DJ King Rico, Factotum) as well as at least one work in progress, Loving v. Virginia (Damien Geter and Jessica Murphy Moo), to be premiered by Virginia Opera in April 2025. We will read across disciplines to get a grounding in intersectional conversations with emphases on women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; race and ethnicity; social class and economic access; and nation. Assignments will include presentations, short assignments, and a larger research project. The goals of this seminar are to (1) understand how music history has incorporated discussions around Blackness in opera, (2) gain knowledge about specific works in some depth, and (3) assess what is at stake for opera as a space of possibility.

What is Critique?

Michael FigueroaDr. Michael A. Figueroa
Wednesday, 2-4:50 pm

Can music studies speak truth to power? Much music research has been positioned as cultural critique, as social justice activism, through public-facing scholarship, or else as being concerned with music’s revelations of the inner workings of power in human societies. The title of this seminar is taken from a 1978 lecture by historian Michel Foucault, in which he explores critique as a way to challenge dominant narratives, question the limits of accepted knowledge, and uncover the conditions of possibility for truth. Such a view of critique has the potential to unsettle accepted frameworks for the ethnographic, hermeneutic, and historical practices of music scholars. More than a survey of critical theory and its application in music research, this seminar will provide students with the opportunity to imagine what critique(s) that music scholars might offer to the humanities and social sciences writ large, and final papers will be geared toward that imaginative work. In the lead-up, we will develop a thorough understanding of extant critical research, with a focus on theoretical and methodological insights from music studies, anthropology, critical Black studies, philosophy, political theory, post- and de-colonial studies, post-structuralism, and queer of color critique, among other discourses. Our approach to musical repertory will be eclectic, spanning geographical settings but rooted contemporaneously with the 20th- and 21st-century history of ideas we engage.

Fall 2024

Blackness, Music, and Value Otherwise

Dr. Deonte Harris
Monday, 2:00-4:50 pm

This seminar seeks to generate a new methodological and theoretical model for the study of value by incorporating multidisciplinary and intersectional approaches to its study. Situating music, race, and Blackness as the primary frames of analysis, this course is guided by the following core questions regarding the nature of value in the world and the possibility of value otherwise: What is value, and how is it produced or assigned to things, activities, and even entire social groups perceived as “different?” Why are certain values consistently, and systematically, privileged over others (e.g., wealth accumulation and private property over human lives and the natural environment, the Global North over the Global South, Western art music over folk/traditional/popular music genres, whiteness over Blackness, etc.)? And finally, what unique insights about race and value surface through a focus on music and its commodification, especially Black musicking in the wake of slavery, colonialism, and empire?

Drawing from the anthropological and musicological study of value, as well as critical race, African diaspora, and Black feminist studies, this course interrogates the ways that Blackness is rendered valuable as units of labor and consumable culture under capitalism, while Black life itself is all too often considered to be expendable. Moreover, through analyses of archival, ethnographic, literary, and phonographic source materials on “valued Blackness,” we will gain a better understanding of how the propagation of antiblack racisms and the larger enterprise of racial capitalism are both inextricably linked to the ongoing political struggle of people of African descent to produce a world where Black lives, futures, and ways of being are valued otherwise. Assignments for this course will include short responses to weekly readings, analyses of select listening examples, student-facilitation of discussion sessions, and a final research project and in-class presentation on the theme “Value Otherwise,” focused on the music and lived experiences of members of marginalized and historical oppressed social groups.

Deconstructing Early Music Printing

Anne MacNeilDr. Anne MacNeil
Wednesday, 2:00-4:50 pm

This seminar explores the cognitive dissonance between music and history. If music as an artform resists documentation, history is created from documents – artifacts that present a hazy and incomplete view of the past. Focusing on the earliest prints of Italian popular song, students in the class will work with the instructor to curate a public-facing exhibit about the interface of oral and written musical cultures in 15th– and 16th-century Italy. This work will be informed by readings in archival studies & practices, historical musicology, and performance practices.

Recent Seminars

Address

UNC Department of Music
CB# 3320; 105 Hill Hall
145 E Cameron Ave
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3320

Contact

phone: (919) 962-1039
music@unc.edu
Faculty Intranet

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