Graduate Seminars
Spring 2024
Toward a Critical Theory of the Spectacle
Dr. Anna B. Gatdula
Monday, 2:00-4:50 pm
In this graduate seminar, we will embark on a multidisciplinary exploration of “the spectacle” within the realms of critical theory, media studies, theater and performance studies, and cultural anthropology. This dynamic term, emblematic of modern cultural theory, encompasses a rich tapestry of aesthetic, affective, and ideological dimensions. The seminar seeks to forge a comprehensive and inclusive theoretical approach that navigates the intricate interplay between the spectacle’s visual and sonic allure, its cultural signification, and its political resonances. Scholars and critics with whom we will engage include: Guy Debord, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Michel Chion, Laura Mulvey, Susan Buck-Morss, Peggy Phelan, Diana Taylor, Martha Feldman, Victor Turner, Jacques Ranciére, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson III, Matthew Morrison, Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant, and Anna Kornbluh. Assignments include a final annotated bibliography and in-class presentation. Students will be assessed on their contributions to the weekly seminar discussion.
Engaging Verdi, Opera, and Culture
Dr. Naomi André
Thursday, 2:00-4:50 pm
This seminar explores the works of Giuseppe Verdi and how his operas have had meaning in their own time up through today. We will explore the historical context of the Risorgimento (the nineteenth century Italian unification movement) and examine how the different areas of Italy (northern and southern), Spain, France, German-speaking regions, St. Petersburg, London, and Cairo played important roles in shaping Verdi’s repertoire. In this course we will gain an understanding Verdi’s biography and the sources that flesh out his life (including collections of his letters) and cover modes of analysis in Verdi studies (e.g., creating the critical edition and the conventions of la solita forma). We will read broadly in interdisciplinary areas regarding nation and power, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and other topics as they arise. This course takes the stance that the plights of opera characters tell us more than static fictional stories; they show us how people articulate their beliefs and define themselves over different periods in time. We will look at how Verdi’s operas stage themes around class distinctions, gender portrayals, racial representations, moral codes in changing societies, expressions of sexual fidelity, and the pain of betrayal. Assignments will include leading weekly discussions, collaborative analyses, and a final project that may take the form of a paper, conference presentation, or an equivalent project in a different format.
Fall 2023
Modernism, Modernity/Coloniality, and the Social Stratification of Musical Experience in the Twentieth Century
Dr. Aaron Harcus
Thursday, 2:00-4:50 pm
This seminar explores recent efforts to rethink the history and nature of the diverse forms of musical modernisms in the twentieth century by reexamining the relations among aesthetic modernism, Western modernity, and what Walter Mignolo famously described as its “darker side,” coloniality. In particular, this seminar examines the ways in which ideas of the progress of musical (ir)rationality, long central to discourses of Western musical modernity (including what Joseph N. Straus has recently argued is the fundamental disability aesthetics underlying European musical modernism), have been profoundly shaped by the social stratification (i.e., various forms of inequality and hierarchical organization) of musical practice and experience by various social actors under modernity/coloniality in the twentieth century. By thinking through the relation between musical modernism and modernity/coloniality—an important thread since the emergence of the “new modernism studies” since the early 2000s—and focusing on the stratification of musical practice and experience, we will scrutinize those historiographic methods that continue to maintain traditional dividing lines in modernism studies (even if unintentionally) between “high” and “low” culture, art vs. vernacular music, and “Western” vs. “nonwestern” musical modernisms in music studies. As such, case studies for this seminar include explorations of the experiences of the musically irrational, in the realm of tone presence, rhythm and meter, and the technological mediation of timbre throughout the long twentieth century among diverse social actors (talent scouts, early twentieth-century comparative musicologists, songwriters, record collectors, producers, DJs, composers, casual fans) across lines of race, class, ability, gender and sexuality, participating in a range of art worlds, musical scenes, social fields, and other institutional settings. Weekly assignments will include readings and short reading responses to topics from a diverse range of theoretical approaches from social theory, phenomenology, historiography, and music theory (among others), and short listening/analysis projects. The seminar culminates in a research paper and conference-style talk based on the interests of seminar participants.
Voices in the Archives
Dr. Mark Katz
Monday, 2:00-4:50 pm
This seminar explores the presence and absence of the voices of marginalized musicians in archival collections and their inclusion and exclusion through archival practices. The impetus for this course and its structuring feature is the creation of the Alim Braxton Collection, which will hold hundreds of letters and other documents related to the life and music of the collection’s namesake, a rapper, writer, and activist currently incarcerated on North Carolina’s Death Row. Students in the class will work with the instructor in consultation with Braxton and his family to assemble, organize, and document the papers, which will become a part of UNC’s Southern Historical Collection. (The collection will be the SHC’s first to gather the papers of an incarcerated person.) This work will be informed by readings on the history and ethics of archival practices within the fields of archival studies, ethnomusicology, and historical musicology. Activities and discussion will be guided by this question: What can or should an archival collection that centers the voice of an incarcerated musician look like?
Recent Seminars
- CONTENT WARNING: Trauma and Music/Performance with Prof. David F. Garcia
- Music of the Mediterranean in the Time of Columbus with Prof. Anne MacNeil
- Improvisation and Social Theory with Prof. Michael Figueroa
- Perspectives on the Western Musical Canon with Prof. Mark Evan Bonds
- Women and Musical Creativity in the 1920s and 1930s with Prof. Annegret Fauser
- Music Analysis and Music Videos with Prof. Jocelyn Neal
- Music and Intersections of Women’s Suffrage, Abolition, and Temperance in the United States with Prof. Anne MacNeil
- Orality and Literacy in Historical Musical Practice with Prof. Elizabeth G. Elmi
- Historiography and Analysis of Black Music in the United States with Prof. Aaron Harcus
- Music and Incarceration in the United States with Prof. Mark Katz
- Sound and/as Rupture with Prof. Andrea Bohlman
- A History of Listening with Prof. Evan Bonds
- Music and the Archive in the Academic Eras of COVID and Anti-Racism with Prof. David F. Garcia