Graduate Courses 2022-2023
A current listing of the graduate courses for 2022-2023 is available below (subject to change). For further information on course content, please consult the instructor directly.
Fall 2022
MUSIC 601 SEM A14: Advanced Piano Literature I
Fall 2022: Tuesday & Thursday 11:00 am-12:20 pm
Instructor: Viktoria Reiswich-Dapp
This course will survey the repertoire of music written for the piano and its predecessors, spanning from the Renaissance to the end of the Classical era. We will examine important works from the repertoire, study general stylistic characteristics of each composer as well as their overall output for piano, and also discuss historical and cultural context surrounding the pieces. This includes aspects of performance practice and interpretation, an introduction to important concert pianists, an examination of music recordings, and a reflection of the multisensory aspect of making and communicating through music. Course Format: The objectives of this course will be learned from a combination of formal lectures, assigned readings, audiovisual materials, and practical exploration of the repertoire at the piano.
Music 555: Music and Text
Fall 2022: Wednesday 1:00 pm-4:00 pm
Instructor: Maryam Moshaver
This seminar examines the many problems and registers of text-music interaction, with a focus on Romantic and Symbolist repertories of the long 19th century. Beginning with the idea of mimesis, where music is seen to imitate or express in its own medium the images and sentiments presented in a poetic text, the seminar will focus on the critiques and radical transformations of this model in the philosophical aesthetics of the 19th century, as well as in the compositional practice Schubert, Schumann, Mahler, Strauss, Wolf, and Debussy. Readings include works by Rousseau, Lessing, Schlegel, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Poe, Valéry, Adorno among others. Emphasis will be on oral and written interpretive analysis.
Music 630: Graduate Choral Conducting
Fall 2022: Monday, Wednesday & Friday 11:00-11:50 am
Instructor: Tim Shantz
Designed for students majoring in Choral Conducting or anyone with permission of the instructor, this course focuses on the practice and study of conducting technique including musical communication & expression through gesture. Musical scores will be used to build stylistic interpretation skills, develop cultural and historic awareness and knowledge of performance practice in the vast history of choral music. Students will develop rehearsal techniques and methodologies for a wide variety of choral works, in coordination with Music 633/634. The course is taught in lab form with students forming the ensemble. Learning will be enhanced through video analysis, special guest presentations, student presentations, score reading and discussions.
Music 632: Wind Band Conducting FULL YEAR
Fall 2022/Winter 2023: Tuesday 9:30 am
Instructor: Angela Schroeder
This course is designed for students majoring in Wind Band Conducting, or anyone with special permission. The course will focus on Wind Band repertoire, pedagogy, rehearsal technique, score study, wind band history and conducting technique. Students will develop greater awareness of the wind band as a genre its place in the larger Western Art music canon. The course is full year - 6 credits.
Music 670: Proseminar in Popular Music and Media Studies
Fall 2022: Friday 9:00-11:50 am
Instructor: Brian Fauteux
Music 670 is a proseminar that provides a survey of the history, issues, and methodologies in Popular Music Studies and its related fields, and explores music in its variety of popular and mediated forms. It will critically evaluate the production, reception, performance, and circulation of popular music and explore the various ways in which popular music communicates ideologies, meanings, aesthetics, forms of resistance, and cultural and technological shifts. We focus on the processes and methods that popularize music and facilitate its ability to reach audiences, both historically and in a contemporary context. A key component of this proseminar is the use of a Media Studies approach to the study of popular music, paying special attention to issues of power, industries, identity, sound technology, visual media, cultural policy, and cultural geography. This course is open to all graduate students in the Department of Music and students in related disciplines are welcome to join through obtaining permission of the Instructor.
Winter 2023
Music 404: Piano Literature II
Winter 2023: Tuesday & Thursday 11:00 am-12:20 pm
Instructor: Viktoria Reiswich-Dapp
This course surveys the repertoire of music written for the piano from the Romantic era to the present, with a focus on the development of significant genres, techniques, and stylistic trends. Emphasis will not only be placed on recognizing and understanding the significance of the so-called “standard repertoire,” but also on historical and cultural context surrounding these pieces and composers. This includes aspects of performance practice and interpretation, an introduction to important concert pianists, an examination of music recordings, and a reflection of the multisensory aspect of making and communicating through music. Course Format: The objectives of this course will be learned from a combination of formal lectures, assigned readings, audiovisual materials, and practical exploration of the repertoire at the piano.
Music 501: What Makes Music Last?
Winter 2023: Friday 9:00-11:50 am
Instructor: Fabio Morabito
For the past two centuries, the culture of Western art music has consisted largely of the consumption of earlier repertoires: music surviving its own time, heard and reheard as a model of excellence. J. S. Bach is still celebrated today, but his wife (also a competent musician) is not; Mozart is, but his just-as-prolific contemporary Antonio Rosetti isn’t. This is why, in common parlance, we refer to Western art music simply as “classical”. It is – for better or worse – a selection of musical monuments. The idea of an artistic canon (treating certain pieces of music and certain musicians as worthy of continued appreciation) is one of the most complex historical structures of the West, yet one we tend to take for granted. Who chose/chooses the monuments and how? Who is excluded and why? This seminar offers an exploration of key historiographical issues and conceptual tools to evaluate critically notions of composerly immortality/greatness in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. To this period date many practices that shaped our enduring fascination with these larger-than-life figures: from biographies boasting heroic accounts of musicians’ lives and compositional progress, to thinking of artistic creativity as a product of masculine prowess and virility, which sustained the creation of a male-dominated musical canon.
Music 566: Topics In Ethnomusicology: Music, Sound and Wellbeing
Winter 2023: Tuesday & Thursday 11:00 am-12:20 pm
Instructor: Michael Frishkopf
In this class we will survey the many roles of music, and – more generally – sound, for promoting human wellbeing, socially, psychologically, and physiologically, curatively and preventively, throughout the ages (but primarily in the contemporary period). Readings, listenings, and viewings will include research outputs (ethnographic, clinical, experimental, or applied) as well as primary source material, touching on a broad spectrum of topics across the arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, applied sciences, and health sciences. Possible topics include music and sound in ritual or meditation, musical ecstasy/trance, music and the metaphysical, music as medicine, medical ethnomusicology, (community) music therapy, music and resilience, music and trauma, music and global/public health, the power of natural soundscapes, music for global human development, music and social networks, music of/for immigrants and refugees, music and community empowerment, psychology of music, music and the brain, music and pandemic, music and sound for mental health. During the course of the term students will investigate a particular topic of interest, as well as design and carry out a short, original research project, whose writeup will serve as the final paper.
Music 584: Advanced Studies in Music and Society: Who Owns Music?
Winter 2023: Wednesday 9:00-11:50 am
Instructor: Patrick Nickleson
Ownership is never as simple as we like to imagine. Land ownership can be portrayed as exclusive property, a set of reciprocal obligations, or a tradition of common responsibilities. In music, we conceive ownership through the moral and legal language of copyright and authorship—but critical scholarship on music rarely steps back to address the long historical assumptions through which we exhibit music within an “imaginary museum” as traditional propriety, personal property, or collective patrimony. In Who Owns Music?, we will critically examine a wide range of literatures on authorship, property (intellectual and landed), copyright, collectivism, ethnography, archiving, writing, and recording in relation to music. Among other topics, we will investigate: the history of copyright in Canada and other settler states; theories of authorship and intellectual property in music, literature, and film; political notions of individual and collective responsibility; the history, culture, and technology of sampling, dub, and remix; the collisions of Indigenous and settler conceptions of ownership in North America; museum collections of music (and their shared etymologies); the discourse of “forensic musicology” and recurrent legal battles over songwriting, theft, and “originality”; the place of music in relation to NFTs and cryptocurrency; and more. Participants will come away from the course with an expansive sense of the contingency and complexity of ownership claims in music and how they support Euro-American ideals of individuality, property, and originality that all meet in the legal fiction of the author.
Music 595: The Business of Music
Winter 2023: Wednesday 6:00-9:00 pm
Instructor: Guillaume Tardif
Exploring various aspects of the music industry and related careers, including performance, culture and creativity, copyrights and licensing, publishing, recording; introducing various business concepts with applications in the context of music; developing skills via class exercises and assignments (analysis and problem-solving, planning, financing and budgeting, decision-making, communication, team-working, negotiating, entrepreneurship, leadership).
Music 634: Choral Literature II
Winter 2023: TBD
Instructor: Tim Shantz
This seminar delves into the vast and varied music written for choir from ca. 1800 to the present day. Representative works are studied with a focus on primary source material in the form of musical scores. Music will be discussed with a particular focus on historical and cultural context, musical influences and the emergence of new forms in choral music. Admission is open to all graduate students and is required for graduate students in choral conducting along with Music 633 (Graduate Choral Literature I, offered in alternating years). The course consists of seminar presentations, score study, listening assignments and a research paper.