Topic for Winter 2009: Chamber Music and Sociability This class will take as its subject the intersection between amateur chamber music and European social custom during the eighteenth century. Students will explore how chamber music figured into the social life of well-to-do Europeans, as well as how the music itself modeled social relationships, issues of class and gender, and types of social discourse of the era. My definition of "chamber music" will be rather particular, for I take it to mean music performed in the home by a soloist or group of musicians. While the primary focus will be on amateur music-making, the encroachment of professional musicians into the domain of chamber music will also be considered. We will explore and play through genres like the dance suite, the accompanied sonata, the art song, the string quartet, and the piano duet. Students will consult primary texts—conversation manuals, novels, etc.—as well as secondary sources in their engagement with the topic.

Topic for Spring 2009: Sacred Music of Spain's Golden Age
This class is designed to offer students a survey of sacred music in Spain and its colonies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will investigate how music figured into Spanish religious devotion in church ceremonies and ritual. We will also consider how music functioned to consolidate Spain's position as a world power, especially with regard to its colonizing missions in the New World and in the Far East. This seminar will trace genres and developments within Spanish sacred music in the Golden Age and examine how music operated as a vehicle of religious communication, mystical devotion, power, and national prestige.

Topic for Spring, 2009: Music and Mystical Experience
What is mystical experience? And how do sound and music evoke, induce, or otherwise bring us into relation with it? These questions will provide the ground for a cross-cultural, multi-disciplinary, and diachronic exploration of the ways in which human beings experience the numinous through music. Readings from contemporary and historical sources in eastern and western philosophy, psychology, and the history and theory of music will provide intellectual and aesthetic contexts in which to engage with a variety of musical practices and traditions. In the spirit of its title, the course will also require a commitment to specific contemplative practices -- not bound to any particular belief system -- that will be introduced in an effort to cultivate qualities of mind conducive to contemplative engagement with a work of music or the experience of sound.

Topic for Winter 2009: Performing Arts of Bali
An interdisciplinary exploration of the intersections of Balinese music, dance, and drama. We will discuss the relationship of these performance generes to Hindu epic literature, Balinese Hindu religion, and senses of global and local identity.

Topic for Spring 2009: Music and Gender
This course will examine relationships between music practices and constructions of gender around the world, including case studies from Latin America, the Middle East, the Balkans, and Southeast Asia. We will read studies by ethnomusicologists who use theories from gender studies, women's studies, and feminist scholarship to analyze their own particular research topics.