Music faculty are offering new musicology courses to students next semester.
Dr. Christa Bentley and Dr. Jake Johnson, assistant professors of musicology, revised the musicology curriculum and will offer seminars in Fall 2018.
“It was a unique situation because we both came in as new hires this year. Typically, you’re working with someone who’s been here a lot longer, and there might be more red tape. But, with two fresh sets of eyes on the curriculum and ideas, we were able to make these changes,” Bentley said.
Musicology requirements used to be a history course, two western music courses and a 20th Century course, but the new curriculum focuses on developing different skills.
“The first course is about research, and it’s done through world music. The second is about writing, and it’s done through western music, and the third pairs those skills together through a particular topic and culminate in a major paper,” Bentley said. “One of these classes will be a seminar.”
The two musicology seminars for the fall semester are American Music during the Depression and World War II, and Sound and Religion.
Bentley will teach American Music during the Depression and World War II. The class will focus on the connections between political and social issues in the 1930s and ’40s and the music composed at the time.
“I paired the ’30s and ’40s together because there are actually really interesting connections between what was going on in World War II and the historical period that preceded it,” Bentley said. “It was a moment when a lot of people were asking questions about what it means to be an American.”
A variety of genres will be covered including: concert repertoire, folk music, jazz, and music written for the stage and screen.
“One of the things in this seminar that I’m really excited about is that it allows us to take an issue and traverse a bunch of genres and styles of music,” Bentley said. “We get this nice little journey that we can go on asking these questions and understanding how genres and points of view are interacting musically.”
Johnson will teach Sound and Religion. He said the purpose of the class is to look at sounds heard in relation to religion, which isn’t exclusive to music. He said the class will involve the progression of sound and religious experiences.
Johnson said students will look at the Bible, the Quran and the Book of Mormon mostly because the former two were originally dictated.
“I think it’s really asking two questions,” he said. “One is what kinds of sounds do we make that are religious and the other is what kinds of religious experiences or religious organizations are possible or organized around the sounds that we make.”
Johnson is working on two books about musical theater and religion and said he’s excited to teach a class related to his research.
The seminars will change every semester, though popular courses may be repeated, Bentley said. The topics planned for Spring 2019 are Gender and Music, and Hip Hop in Musical Theater, which Johnson also will teach.
“We’ll use Hamilton to discuss what happens when you have two genres that are very different from each other collide,” Johnson said.
Johnson said part of the class will involve discussing different racial conversations involving the two genres. He said students they are interested in the different seminars.
“The hope is that students will have a greater interest and see the relevance in music history in their everyday lives,” he said.
Topics haven’t been chosen for Fall 2019, but some of the ideas are migration and music, lieder and the American symphony.
Bentley said the departure from a history-based curriculum is partly because there is too much information to cover.
“You run into the problem that we’re almost 20 years into the 21st century and more and more gets added,” Bentley said. “There aren’t enough hours to cover everything, so you have to make cuts somewhere.”
The seminars are upper division courses for music majors, but if other students show interest, they could be added to the class once students require to take it are registered, Bentley said.
Sara McKean, music education junior, said she is taking Bentley’s course next semester.
“I’m really excited that the music school is changing their curriculum and actively trying to keep up with our current social climate and realizing that their students have different interests and trying to appeal to that as much as possible,” McKean said.
Contributing: Zoe Travers, editor-in-chief and Emily Wollenberg, associate web editor
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