Course Syllabus

Fridays, 11:00 am - 1:50 pm
Music Building room 4033 (CAMIL computer lab)
- at 1 pm, we move downstairs to room 0360
Stephen Taylor, office MB 4030
office hours Thursdays 2:30 - 3:30 pm, and by appointment

Course Description

Music and representation, from Bach to sonification. 2 or 4 hours. The final project can be either a research paper or an original data sonification; if you take the course for 4 hours, I will ask you to do both.

Topics

1. The big picture: What is music? Why do we do it? Bruno Nettl has written perhaps the best definition of music, in the New Grove Dictionary (2001). In this seminar, I'm interested in how musicians use music to represent ideas: this ranges from program music (like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony), to musical cryptograms (like Berg encoding the name of his lover into his opera Lulu), to data sonification. This brings up the relation of music to language (see below).
2. Bach's music and representation. Bach wrote what could be called "program music" or "tone painting," with vivid descriptions of the Crucifixion and other topics. He also used gematria, a kind of numerology, to encode messages and numbers into his music (some scholars have gone overboard with this). And he famously used his own name in his final, unfinished fugue from the Art of the Fugue. Analyzing Bach's music to see how he did this will give us some hands-on experience with one of the masters of these techniques. From a strictly musical point of view, I'm going to argue that Bach's canons are a special kind of musical encryption: an individual line encodes itself, at other points in musical space and time (not unlike DNA, actually). Bach's late masterworks, the Musical Offering and Art of the Fugue, are full of these ingenious canons.
3. The evolutionary origins of music and language. The first question, what is music, raises other questions: who do we make music? What is the difference between music and language? Is music the "language of emotion"? How can music represent extra-musical ideas, if it's just a series of abstract sounds? Current research into the evolution of both music and language provides some fascinating insight into these questions, and we will sample some of this rapidly developing research. A related topic is the philosophy of music and representation - this can get quite technical, but also worthwhile.
4. Sonification. In some ways, data sonification can be thought of as an updated version of program music, or maybe even better, musical encryption. We'll read The Sonification Handbook, to see what the current best practices are for sonification. One really interesting aspect, at least for me, is that sonification straddles the line between "music" and "sound design," as practiced in video games and film. This gets into electro-acoustic music, musique concrète, etc. etc.
5. Original contributions. My fondest hope for this semester is that we make a beginning towards a contribution to "program music" and sonification. I suspect that current research on music and evolution can give us ideas about Beethoven, Debussy, Xenakis, etc. etc. And for sonification, I'm getting some data sets from colleagues on campus for us to mess around with. We may do some work in SuperCollider and/or Max. It's still a developing field, and I think there are things we can do both in thinking about sonification, and it actually doing it. Also - and this is my own idiosyncratic idea - I've always been inspired by Bach's inscription at the end of his pieces, "Soli Deo Gloria." In other words, his music had a purpose beyond itself - as the American composer Tom Johnson says, it's about more than "autobiography". I'm trying to write pieces these days that have a purpose beyond the sound itself, a kind of double meaning (although really, at the end of the day, you could argue that there is no higher purpose than the sound itself, and listening, and playing). Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I'm wrestling with, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to try this seminar. It's definitely the kind of class where we are all exploring together.

Required texts

• J. S. Bach, The Art of the Fugue & A Musical Offering (Dover, 1992) ($14)
• James Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason (Harper, 2006) ($12)
• Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (Harvard, 2007) ($21)
• (optional) Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1999) ($17)
• The Sonification Handbook (free pdf)

(I think the library has an interesting Chinese translation of the Hofstadter.)

Grading

The grading will be based on discussions, presentations and the final project; there aren't any tests, since it's more of a discovery and exploration, rather than a mastery course. Although I may have us write some canons for practice.

Final project

The final project will be either a research paper (at least 2000 words), an original sonification project (for either electronics or live instruments), or both. If you are taking the seminar for four hours, I will require both.