Theater and Dance 247 - Visible Musics

(Offered as MUSI 419 and THDA 247) What is music? What are its materials? Where does it begin and end? Where does it happen? And who makes it? In this seminar, we’ll explore music at its borders with other art forms, including sound, dance, theater, film, sculpture, the museum, and the archive. Asking questions of medium, audience, and authorship, we’ll study how music’s boundaries have been navigated—and at times dissolved—by a variety of groups and individuals from the late nineteenth century until today. In the process, we will read scholarship at the intersection of these fields and their respective media, work with archival materials in the College’s Archives and special Collections, and engage with
contemporary practitioners working in and between art forms, including choreographer Miro Magloire, composer Steven Takasugi, and film and visual artist John Muse. Through these conversations and intensive reading, viewing, and listening, we will construct a theoretical toolkit for thinking and writing critically about music and visual arts at their respective boundaries. In addition to regular discussion posts in response to reading, each seminar member will present and direct a seminar discussion of a specific reading. Students will write a series of reviews of performances and exhibitions that we will visit during the semester, producing a portfolio of writings that they will revise for final submission, with an accompanying reflection on the development of the portfolio, at the conclusion of the semester; alternatively, students might choose to complete a research paper, or to pursue a creative project. This course fulfills the departmental seminar requirement for the major. Spring semester. Visiting Assistant Professor Fitz Gibbon.

How to handle overenrollment: Music majors, then class years (seniors, juniors, sophomores).

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: emphasis on readings, class discussion, and written work; independent research; group work