Courses

MUSC 5000

This graduate seminar is designed to cultivate advanced musicological research and writings skills.  Students will gain experience using a major research library, critically evaluating sources, mastering organizational problems associated with research, and presenting musicological evidence, ultimately leading to publication-quality writing.  These skills will be developed through short weekly assignments as well as an annotated bibliography and a major research paper.

MUSC 5001

This course is an introduction to recent methods and techniques of music scholarship: we will consider the scholarly approaches of music theory, historical musicology, music criticism, popular music studies and cultural studies. The focus of our inquiry will be the potential advantages of such lines of questioning, and their significance for musicology as a scholarly discipline.

MUSC 8000

This registers involvement in developing the thesis prospectus and in reading towards the thesis.

MUSC 5366
This advanced seminar examines current critical issues related to music of the global eighteenth century. While most courses on music of the Baroque and Classical period deal with famed European composers (Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn to name only a few), this course will focus instead on music in communities outside of Europe, including China, India, Indonesia, Persia, Egypt, Turkey, New Guinea, South Africa, New Zealand, Peru and North America (Indigenous communities such as the Iroquois). Various critical frameworks for developing a postcolonial approach to music of the eighteenth century will be explored. Students will gain practical experience of interpreting primary source documents observing musical communities around the world. Drawing from a wide range of readings in musicology, ethnomusicology, postcolonial studies and ocean studies, among others, we will consider the impact of global knowledge exchange on European music, organology and the earliest music histories dating to the eighteenth century. 

MUSC 5355

An interdisciplinary survey of 19^th-century Western music, focusing on the narrative potential of 19^th-century instrumental music and its relationship to other aspects of 19^th-century Western culture. Representative works will be studied within the context of broader social and cultural issues including gender, sexuality, race, class, nationalism, ethnicity, colonialism, and identity.

MUSC 5354
We examine various methods and techniques for studying popular music, the central debates of this relatively new field of scholarly inquiry, and the contributions of popular music scholarshipto the larger fields of music study.

This seminar consists in an exploration of some of today's main compositional techniques, as well as the numerous ways in which musicians have redefined the craft of composition since the end of World War II. From Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage to the DJ culture, the course will examine topics including, among others: advanced serial techniques, aleatoric procedures and improvisation; Musique Concrète and electroacoustic music, as well as their influence on instrumental music; the impact of non-western and popular music on so-called serious music; musical borrowing; the mingling with other art forms, such as theatre, video, media arts, sculpture and installations.

This seminar will explore the music and some aspects of the literature of medieval poet and composer, Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377).  For modern musicologists, Machaut is one of the most significant musical figures from the Middle Ages, largely because he collated his own music and poetry in large complete-works’ manuscripts, unlike his contemporaries whose music appears instead in anthology manuscripts. Topics will include manuscript study, notation, the musical materials employed by Machaut, illuminations in the manuscripts, Machaut’s sense of authorship, the notion of the hybrid text, and a historical and musical contextualisation of Machaut.

This course explores the special features of Schubert and his music, with a focus on the following topics: subjectivity, gender issues, unorthodox uses of tonality, narrative procedures in songs and instrumental works, the influence of song on other types of composition, the shadow of Beethoven, performance issues, editions, and reception.

This course will study the rich tradition of francophone singer- songwriters in Canada, from La Bolduc and Lionel Daunais to Pierre Lapointe and Mes Aïeux. Special attention will be given to the mixed influences from francophone Europe (e.g. Trenet, Brel, Ferré) and the English speaking world (e.g. British bands of the 60’s and 70’s, American folk singers). The important role of Québec’s francophone popular music in shaping cultural identity and its relation to nationalistic movements will also be studied, as well as the important contribution of francophone artists outside Québec (e.g. Zachary Richard, Marie-Jo Thério).

This course examines various engagements of landscape and German music from the Enlightenment to Wagner.  Topics to be examined include English landscape gardens and C.P.E Bach’s Free Fantasies; botany and gender in the operas of J.A. Hiller; landscape, time and the Bildungsroman in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte; representations of nature in the characteristic symphony, including Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony; supernatural landscapes in Weber’s Der Freischütz; the role of nature in Schubert’s Lieder; Wagnerian landscapes and the role of nature in nineteenth-century German music theory.  Readings are drawn from contemporary literary figures including Goethe and Wieland, landscape aesthetics, especially Hirschfeld’s Theorie der Gartenkunst (1779-1785), and aesthetic writings concerning the beautiful and the sublime by Kant and Schiller.  Ability to read German is an asset but not a requirement.

A seminar focusing on music in American society during the nineteenth century, tracing the multiple and varied music-making traditions in nineteenth-century America and investigating how they participated in the negotiation of race, class, gender, and other vital social issues.  Students will investigate primary sources and secondary scholarship to develop a critical understanding or nineteenth-century American music culture and its continuing impact on American society and culture.

This advanced seminar examines recent scholarship on the intersection between European opera and politics from Monteverdi to the present day.  Viewing opera as a multi-medial art form and a site for the cultural and political interaction, we will examine the various intricate relationships between opera and society and probe the analytic methods of social and political dimensions of operatic works and practices.  Topics to be explored include: the representation of empires, states, and rulers; notions of sentimentality and audience identification; constructions of political and national identity in opera; representations of ‘the people’ and the operatic chorus; political appropriation of famous opera songs; Wagner and the Ring cycle; politicized productions, particularly during the twentieth century; and finally, the cultural and political systems inherent to the production of the genre.  Students will be encouraged to critically consider selected readings from a variety of disciplines, including: musicology, political history, sociology, and literary criticism.  In fact, probing and comparing a wide variety of methodological approaches to this topic will form a central component of the course. Weekly preparation for classes will include listening/viewing of short excerpts or scenes from operas. 

This advanced seminar offers the opportunity to engage in an in-depth study of Mozart’s operas on stage and screen.  The operas themselves – the text, music, drama, staging, scenery – and various strategies of adaptation will be the focus of this course.  A wide variety of theoretical frameworks and approaches to performance and cinema studies will be scrutinized.  Questions to be examined include: what were the processes of staging an opera in Mozart’s day? What role do performers play in interpretations of Mozart’s operas? What happens when an opera is adapted for screen?  How do audiences experience the different mediums of stage and screen?  Staged performances to be examined include the infamous Walter Felsenstein, Peter Sellars and Hans Neuenfels productions; film adaptations to be examined include those of Lotte Reiniger, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Kenneth Branagh.

This seminar explores popular music, including scholarship rooted in musicology, sociology, and performance studies.  We will discuss case studies from several genres and will compare contemporary ethnographic research with other approaches to popular music (e.g., Frankfurt School critical theory, Birmingham School cultural studies, and text-oriented popular music studies). We will be attentive to production, circulation, and reception practices, as well as the ongoing erosion of the barriers separating these domains.  Major topics include matters of identity (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, generation); concepts of the transnational/cosmopolitan; popular music’s dominant narratives and countermemories; music journalism; protest musics; and popular music’s role in the classroom.

MUSC 5356

This course examines opera on film from the early twentieth century to the present day. We will begin by debating the merits and shortcomings of opera on film; in other words, are there elements of live performance that are lost? What is gained by adapting opera for film? Students will be introduced to concepts such as diegetic vs. non-diegetic music and will gain familiarity with a variety of cinematic techniques, including POV (point of view), zoom, doubling, mirroring and manipulations of time. Through carefully selected listening/viewing excerpts and readings (including writings by film directors), we will explore topics such as the relationship between sound and image, especially in early silent films; star singers such as Geraldine Farrar, and early excerpts of opera arias on film; notions of realism in opera and film; Menotti’s film-operas, opera for national television, including Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute; political ideology embedded in Losey’s Don Giovanni and Rosi’s Carmen; notions of subjectivity and cinematic technique in Ponnelle’s productions; gesture and symbol in Zeferelli’s Otello, Wagnerian conceptions of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Syberberg’s Parsifal; and influences of mass media (MTV and American talk shows) in Peter Sellars’ Mozart productions.

MUSC 5364
This course will address the history and function of child performers of music. We will consider the phenomenon of precocious talent and analyse the fascinating appeal of performing children in selected instrumental and vocal music genres.

MUSC 5371
In the last twenty-five years, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), frequently cited as the first woman composer, has become widely known in contemporary English-speaking culture, but the intense modern interest in her and her works (including her music) began in the 1840s in the Rhine village of Eibingen. This seminar will examine both how Hildegard and her works were understood during her lifetime and how she has been constructed (and by whom) in the modern era.

MUSC 5367
How might mapping change the way that we conduct opera history? Can we map the transmission and dissemination of operatic genres, styles and practices? What might a geography of early modern opera look like? This advanced seminar seeks to bring musicology into dialogue with geography to pose new questions about opera from 1600-1800. Focusing on the era of global expansion we will examine how operatic music and singers moved around the globe, and the subsequent impact on operatic practices. Following some methodological readings on “thick mapping” and the relational materialities of sound, we will examine digital methods for visualizing and mapping data, especially neo4j and tableau. Students will have the opportunity to develop critical thinking, research and digital skills through a final project of their own design.

MUSC 5365
The Catholic liturgical chant repertory had its beginning in the Middle Ages, and remained a central element in the Church, even as other types of music developed through the centuries. When European Catholics, including priests and missionaries, came to North America in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, they brought this repertory with them. This seminar will explore how chant circulated in the northeastern colonies and Mi'kma'ki, and how it functioned culturally in both settler and Indigenous communities. Using the frame of survivance as articulated by cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor, we will investigate the relationship of chant to Mi'kmaw Catholicism and religious experience. Of particular focus will be a critical consideration of the Indian Good Book (1857), published by an Italian Jesuit priest, Eugene Ventromile. Including Latin chant texts and prayers translated into several Indigenous languages, the book was authorised for use in the dioceses of Halifax (NS), Portland (Maine), and St. John's (NB).

MUSC 5366
Igor Stravinsky significantly influenced the evolution of twentieth-century ballet century — from his path-breaking work with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with works like The Rite of Spring, to his important role in the development of the New York City Ballet in the 1940s and beyond. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, this seminar will examine Stravinsky’s works for ballet and his close collaboration with numerous choreographers, dancers, writers, and artists, including Nicolas Roerich and Vaslav Nijinsky for The Rite (1913), Léonide Massine and Pablo Picasso for Pulcinella (1920), Bronislava Nijinska and Natalia Goncharova for Les Noces (1923), George Balanchine and Isamu Noguchi for Orpheus (1948), Balanchine and T.S. Eliot for Agon (1957). Themes will include relationships between music, choreography, and set/costume design; ballet, fashion, and taste-making; gender and sexuality; neoclassicism and post-war trauma; migration, nationalism, and exoticism; and cultures of celebrity.

MUSC 5370
This seminar class focusses on one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. We will study Aretha Franklin’s six-decade career in order to understand her legacy as a musician, a Civil Rights icon, and a symbol of women’s empowerment. Though close study of her recordings in gospel, soul, and pop styles, we will gain insight into her contributions to contemporary music, and we will complicate the boundaries that often make a distinction between performers and composers.

MUSC 5368
This seminar will explore the music of medieval composer Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). We will examine both the medieval context of Hildegard's musical output and how her music has been constructed (and by whom) in the modern era.

MUSC 5353
Explores themes in the history of music after 1945. This period is so recent that there is not a standard narrative for it, and the very premise of a single absolute narrative is called into question. We will focus throughout this course on music's meaning in contemporary society, with critical attention to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Whether we are exploring avant-garde experimentation, the historical performance movement, jazz, rock, or rap, our aim will be to examine how the music engages with its social and political surroundings, and how it shapes and is shaped by historical circumstances and context.

MUSC 5365
Focuses on vernacular music developed within or derived from African American cultures from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade to the present. While the weekly topics are organized primarily by chronology, the seminar is not designed as a broad or comprehensive survey of African-American music history, but rather as an investigation into selected moments in African-American history, the musical practices and repertories that accompanied them, and the relationship between music and the African American condition in North America.