Syllabus for:
Critical Studies in Music
 (MUSIC 235 and MUSIC 180)   
 University of California, Irvine
Fall Quarter, 2002

course outline

week 1 (Oct. 2) Introduction / Overview
week 2 (Oct. 9) The Listening Experience
readings:
Ola Stockfelt, “Adequate Modes of Listening.”
In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, pp. 129-146. 
Mark Everist, “Reception Theories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value.” 
In Rethinking Music, pp. 378-402. 
Robert Gjerdingen, “An Experimental Music Theory?”
In Rethinking Music, pp. 161-170.
Scott Burnham, “How Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited.”
In Rethinking Music, pp. 193-216.
Fred Everett Maus, “Concepts of Musical Unity.”
In Rethinking Music, pp. 171-192.
week 3 (Oct. 16) The Canon
readings:
Marcia J. Citron, “Canonic Issues.”
In Gender and the Musical Canon,  pp. 15-43.
William Weber, “The History of Musical Canon.”
In Rethinking Music, pp. 336-355.
Richard Hooker, “The Invention of American Musical Culture: Meaning, Criticism,
and Musical Acculturation in Antebellum America.”
In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, pp. 107-126.
Robert P. Morgan, “Rethinking Musical Culture: Canonic Reformulations in a
Post-Tonal Age."
In Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons,  pp. 44-63.
week 4 (Oct. 23) Modernism
readings:
Milton Babbitt, “The Unlikely Survival of Serious Music.”
In Words about Music,  pp. 163-183.
Patrick McCreless, “Rethinking Contemporary Music.”
In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, pp. 12-53.
Susan McClary, “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Composition.”
In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, pp. 54-74.
Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “The Challenge of Contemporary Music.”
In Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music, pp. 265-293.
Susan McClary, “What Was Tonality?”
In Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form,  pp. 63-108.
week 5 (Oct. 30) Semiotics and Deconstruction
readings:
Kofi Agawu, “The Challenge of Semiotics.”
In Rethinking Music, pp., 138-160.
Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “The Cultural Message of Musical Semiology: Some
Thoughts on Music, Language, and Criticism since the Enlightenment.”
In Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music, pp. 169-194.
Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening:
A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky.”
In Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society, pp. 148-176.
David Schwarz, “Listening Subjects: Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, and the Music of
John Adams and Steve Reich.”
In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, pp. 275-298.
week 6 (Nov. 6) Postmodernism
readings:
George Rochberg, “On the Renewal of Music: ‘The Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics 
of Survival,’ ‘Reflections on the Renewal of Music,’ and ‘On the Third String Quartet’.”
In The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music,  pp. 213-242.
Mark Berry, “Music, Postmodernism, and George Rochberg’s Third String Quartet.”
In Postmodern Music / Postmodern Thought, pp. 235-248. 
Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism.”
In Postmodern Music / Postmodern Thought, pp. 13-26.
Susan McClary, “Reveling in the Rubble: The Postmodern Condition.”
In Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, pp. 139-169.
Robert Fink, “Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface.”
In Rethinking Music, pp. 102-137.
Lawrence Kramer, “Prospects: Postmodernism and Musicology.”
In Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, pp. 1-32.
week 7 (Nov. 13) Feminism
readings:
Susan McClary, “Getting Down Off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman’s 
Voice in Janika Vandervelde’s Genesis II.”
In Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality,  pp. 112-131.
Pieter C. van den Toorn, “Feminism, Politics, and the Ninth.”
In Music, Politics, and the Academy, pp. 11-43.
Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism.”
In Rethinking Music, pp. 471-498.
John Shepherd, “Music and Male Hegemony.”
In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception,  pp. 151-172.
Jeniffer Rycenga, “Sisterhood: A Loving Lesbian Ear Listens to Progressive 
Heterosexual Women’s Rock Music.”
In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, pp. 204-228.
week 8 (Nov. 20) Popular Music / Jazz
readings:
Simon Frith, “Towards and Aesthetic of Popular Music.”
In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception,  pp. 133-150.
John Covach, “Popular Music, Unpopular Musicology.”
In Rethinking Music, pp. 425-470.
Robert Walser, “ ‘Out of Notes’: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of 
Miles Davis.”
In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, pp. 147-168. 
Peter Winkler, “Writing Ghost Notes: The Poetics and Politics of Transcription.”
In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, pp. 169-203. 
E. Ann Kaplan, “The Politics of Feminism, Postmodernism, and Rock: Revisited, 
with Reference to Parmar’s Righteous Babes.”
In Postmodern Music / Postmodern Thought, pp. 323-334.
week 9 (Nov. 27) Non-Western Music
readings:
Renée T. Coulombe, “Postmodern Polyamory or Postcolonial Challenge? 
Cornershop’s Dialogue from West, to East, to West …”
In Postmodern Music / Postmodern Thought, pp. 177-194.
Bruno Nettl, “The Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a North 
American Ethnomusicologist.” 
In Rethinking Music, pp. 287-310. 
Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, “Other Musicologies: Exploring Issues and Confronting 
Practice in India.”
In Rethinking Music, pp. 311-335.
Philip V. Bohlman, “Ethnomusicology’s Challenge to the Canon: The Canon’s 
Challenge to Ethnomusicology.”
In Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, pp. 116-136.
week 10 (Dec. 4)  Culture
readings:
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, pp. 215-251.
Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression 
of Listening.”
In The Culture Industry, pp. 29-60.
John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility.”
In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, pp. 173-197.
Timothy D. Taylor, “Music, Technology, Agency, and Practice.”
In Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture, pp. 15-38.
exam period (Dec. 9-13) Wrap-Up
A comprehensive take-home examination will be handed out to students at the final seminar meeting (Wednesday, December 4). The completed exam – in typed or computer-printout format – will be due one week later, at 5 p.m., Wednesday, December 11.
E-mail versions of the final exam will NOT be accepted. Turning in the final exam after the stated deadline will have an adverse effect on the student's grade for the exam.
sources for reading assignments