Fall 2011 Course Offerings

(also MUS 4456, STS 4856, VISST 4856)
Fall.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.   
R. Moseley
R 12:20 - 2:15

Within and across historico-cultural milieux, technological developments tend to estrange sound from source. As Max Weber pointed out in The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, the onus of (re)production is typically divested from individual agents to increasingly intricate instruments and other acoustic devices, giving rise to complex acousmatic relationships between performative acts and sonic outcomes. For Weber, these processes were bound up with industrial disenchantment, and theorists of sound from Adorno to Attali have followed him in conceiving of its production and dissemination according to economic criteria: whether as medium or commodity, sound conveys and connotes capital. From the aulos to the MIDI keyboard, technological advancements have transformed and problematized the relationship between means of sonic production on the one hand and patterns of perception and consumption on the other.

Supplementing these insights, this seminar will explore the idea that disjunctions between “literate” texts that encipher reproductive rules or instructions, whether they be quarter notes, digital audio bitstreams, or computer code, and “oral” acts of performance, from operatic singing to the wielding of plastic pseudo-guitars, can open up sound worlds of musical play as well as sites of labor and exchange. Play takes place in the spaces that open up between sign and sound, instruction and execution, the permissible and the imaginable. Play is performative and sometimes transgressive: players operate both within and against the technological and ideological constraints that define the rules of sonic engagement.

It is with this in mind that we will approach the music-themed video game as both case study and lens through which to perceive how sonic elements can rub up against the visual and the tactile. As sites of cultural contestation and mediation that problematize distinctions between consumption and production, performance and reception, music and noise, action and reaction, and empowerment and enslavement, video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band constitute the most explicit evidence of the collision of the sonic, the playful, and the technological in the early twenty-first century.

As a scholar, teacher, and pianist, Roger Moseley focuses on intersections between the musical disciplines of history, theory, and performance. His interests range from the music of Brahms, on which he wrote his PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, to music-based video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and from eighteenth-century keyboard improvisation to technologies of musical (re)production.

Prior to his appointment as assistant professor of music at Cornell University in 2010, Moseley lectured in music history and theory at the University of Chicago. From 2004-2007 he was a junior research fellow at University College, Oxford, and in 2007 he was awarded an MMus with distinction in collaborative piano from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. More information on Moseley’s activities and recordings of his performances and improvisations are available at www.rogermoseley.com.

(also MUS 4307/7307)
Fall.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.  
E. Bates
M 1:25 - 4:25

A 21st century transcription/analysis class, designed to provide useful analytic methods to ethnomusicologists, musicologists, and composers. We will explore myriad notational systems, from chant and tablature to ethnomusicological analytical transcriptions to experimental music scores, and a variety of computer analysis and transcription tools for visualizing musical and nonmusical sound.