1. Sacred Music in New Spain (score attached)
Attached you will find the score of Manuel de Sumaya’s La bella incorrupta (Villancico for the Virgin of Guadalupe) from Drew Edward Davies’s 2019 edition. Analyze this composition, placing it within the villancico genre as a whole as well as the broader history of sacred music in New Spain from its founding to Sumaya’s time. Which stylistic elements of this work are similar to Spanish or other European music, and which elements could be called distinctively Mexican? Refer to specific measure numbers whenever possible. Finally, what important questions about this work and other music from New Spain has musicological scholarship answered effectively, and what questions await further research? In responding to these latter questions, be sure to provide overviews of other important genres of sacred music from New Spain and of the scholarship on this music. In your essay, refer to literature from your bibliography and other works/collections from your scores list whenever possible.
2. History of Podium Conducting
The history of podium conducting is a musical-technical narrative but also a social-political story. To explore this complexity, write an essay divided into three parts, each centered on a different conductor. Use this format to do the following:
- trace the development of podium conducting as a technical practice
- describe how individual conductors have contributed to the formation of the discipline
- outline the social-political construction/reception of conductors and conducting
- connect changes in conducting with the evolution of orchestras and orchestration
- trace the evolution of a conducting pedagogy, including treatises/textbooks/curricula
The three portions of your essay should not be conceived as separate, but should contain important through-lines. Avoid generalities in favor of concrete details: specific figures, musical bodies, political backdrops; aesthetic/philosophical ideas; historical sources; musical works; contemporary scholars and scholarship, etc.
3. Twentieth-Century Jewish Music
Construct a syllabus for a 15 week undergraduate course for music majors on the topic of 20th century Jewish music. The syllabus should include a 2-3 paragraph overview of the course’s goals and themes, a topic (consisting of a complete sentence) and key readings(s)for each week, and brief prompts for three writing assignments.
1. Musical Settings of the Orpheus Myth
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has attracted composers more than perhaps any other Greek myth, in part because the principal character is explicitly a virtuoso musician. But adaptations differ widely in response to historical moment and changing musical idioms.
In your essay, compare the settings of key moments in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Gluck’s Orfeo, Mitchell’s Hadestown, and Aucoin’s Eurydice. What situations in the myth attract each? How does each adapter work to make the story speak to a new audience? How do generic conventions shape the way each conveys the myth?
2. Sound and Wartime Trauma
As Martin Daughtry has shown, every warzone has its own acoustic profile and generates its own forms of acoustic vigilance, virtuosity, and (in some cases) sound-related trauma. Write an essay in which you compare/contrast the acoustic ‘signatures’ of two warzones: what and how were people hearing in these zones? How was sound being produced, sustained, muffled, weaponized, etc.? In both cases, report on what we know about the long term effects of acoustic exposure for individuals in these zones and (in cases of trauma) what medical interventions proved effective/ineffective.
3. Musical Theater Post-1980
How much have the opposing forces of Stephen Sondheim (or his legacy), the Disney studios, and the megamusical shaped musicals writ large since 1980? Make sure to provide specific examples in your response.
1. Music and Medicine, 1750-1900
Since the late eighteenth century, music’s effect on human minds and bodies has been described in terms of nervous theory. Ideas about the nerves have impacted musical-medical ‘treatments,’ aesthetic assessment of compositions, evaluation of particular instruments, and claims about the gendered and racialized nature of certain musics. Write an essay in which you provide a chronological overview of music’s intersection with nervous ideas from the 1780s to the early 1900s. Avoid generalities in favor of specific examples: musical instruments, composers, critics, works, scientific theories, etc. Refer liberally to key scholarship on the topic, highlighting work have you found particularly helpful. Conclude your essay by meditating on where you think scholarship in this area needs to go next.
2. Blues Queens of the 1920s-30s
In your dissertation, you plan to studying the role of humor in Hip-Hop, but that isn’t the only genre of Black music for which humor has been marginalized: the Smithsonian Jazz collection scrupulously eliminates the comic lead-ins to recordings by Armstrong and Gillespie, for instance. One can scarcely avoid humor, however, when studying the Blues Queens.
Discuss the contexts within which these women developed their skills. Why would humor have counted as an important element in their shows and recordings? How and why did their humor differ from that of male contemporaries? Or from that of minstrelsy (the specter of which haunted Armstrong, Calloway, Gillespie, and Flavor Flav)?
Much of the humor in the recordings of the Blues Queens is located in their lyrics, but their musical nuances in performance matter even more. Choose one recording each by Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey. Explain how each sets up her comic scenario in her lyrics and how she animates it by means of timing, pitch inflection, etc.
3. Hip Hop History 1973-1993
The hip-hop canon is far from settled, yet it seems there is consensus about the earliest years. Or is there? Talk about artists, events, and recordings that are considered essential to the story of hip-hop’s first twenty years, and explain why they’re essential. Who do you think has been omitted and/or should be added to the current canon?