Graduate Seminars
These courses may or may not be open to students outside the School
of Music. Please read the descriptions carefully and check the current
course schedule for more information.
MUS 385 Topics in American Music
This course will examine selected topics in American music between the
late 18th and early 20th centuries drawn from the realms of concert,
folk, and popular music. Topics will vary each semester the seminar
is offered.
MUS 385 Staged Politics: The Musical Theater of Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein
This seminar focuses on the texts and contexts of two crucial works in the history of American musical theater:
Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Both
are bound to the cultural politics of their era--The Cradle to the leftist politics of
the Popular Front; Candide to the contradictions of Einsenhower's America--yet also
resonate with the new contexts of their continuing reception. We will examine the widest possible
range of relevant materials, including Voltaire's Candide, Tim Robbins's movie Cradle
Will Rock, Orson Welles's screenplay based on the original performance, various recordings
of Bernstein's Candide in its many versions, the genre-bending example of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, as well as archival materials from
the Blitzstein and Bernstein collections, to explore the compositional and cultural histories of these two
works.
MUS 385 MTV, Music Video, and “Postmodernism”
The television network MTV and its spin-offs (VH1, MTV 2) have come
to be synonymous in American culture with the development and distribution
of music videos. While MTV has fostered this perception, the phenomenon
of music video predates the network, and its manifestations outside
the MTV “empire” are significant. This course examines music
video from a variety of perspectives: historical, structural, socio-economic,
with particular reference to the issue of MTV and music video as a “postmodern”
cultural phenomenon.
MUS 385 The Delta Blues
This seminar will focus on the music and life circumstances of African
Americans in an area that has been called “the most Southern place
on earth”: the Mississippi Delta. As both a geographic and a socio-cultural
entity, this largely rural farmland, characterized by the extreme poverty
of the majority of its residents, is the home of one of the major contributions
of American music to the world. We will consider the roots of the blues,
the earliest 20th-century reports of Delta blues, the development of
Delta blues on through the 20th century, and the interaction between
blues and gospel. We will also focus on the remarkable line of blues
musicians beginning with Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House,
Muddy Waters, and their contemporaries, who spread the particular sound
of Delta blues around the world. |
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General Undergraduate
Upper Division
Graduate Seminars |
