The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, The Buchmann-Mehta School of Music


Composing a Minority: American Classical Music and its Others.               

semester II, 2019-2020
Seminar, 4 hour weekly course

The course will be held in English.

Name of Lecturer: Dr. Ofer Gazit
Tel:
Email:

Reception time: By Appointment
 

Course requirements

Weekly Reading: 20%

Reading Presentation: 20%

Research Project Presentation: 20%

Seminar paper (20p) or term paper (10p): 40%

Pre requisites (if relevant)

english speaking proficiency and reading comprehension.

Paper may be written in English or Hebrew.

Description of course

During the first half of the 20th century, American composers were attempting to define the sonic identity of American music. This course will look at some of the musical works that constitute these attempts and the musical materials the underlie them: Still’s Afro-American Symphony, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, and Copland’s El Salon Mexico. We Will focus particularly on popular and classical music written by and about minority populations, and how these came to define American modernism and intercultural relations in the first decades of the 20th century. 

Course topics

1. The Harlem Renaissance.
2. WIlliam Grant Still’s Afro American Symphony
3. Slammin’: Gershwin studies Harlem 
4. Thompson and Stein's Four Saints In Three Acts
5. The Good Neighbor -- Mexico US relations in the 1920s
6. Carlos Chavez
7. Aaron Copland’s El Salon Mexico
8. Puerto Rico in the US, and New York’s El Barrio.
9. The Music of Refael Hernandez
10. Leonard Bernstien’s West Side Story

Grading Summary
Weekly Reading: 20%

Reading Presentation: 20%

Project Presentation: 20%

Final Project: 40%

Bibliography

Crist, E.B., 2003. Aaron Copland and the popular front. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56(2), pp.409-465.

Edwards, B.Hayes. .2009. The practice of diaspora: Literature, translation, and the rise of black internationalism. Harvard University Press.

Floyd, Samuel A., ed. 1990. Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Paul Burgett, Vindication as a Thematic Principle in the Writings of Alain Locke on the Music of Black Americans, 29-40.

Gabbard, K., 2000. Race and Reappropriation: Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copland. American Music, 18(4), p.370.

Glasser, R., 1997. My music is my flag: Puerto Rican musicians and their New York communities, 1917-1940 (Vol. 3). Univ of California Press.

Levering, David L. 1981. When Harlem was in Vogue, New York: Penguin Press.

MacDonald, Raymond A.R., David J. Hargreaves, and Dorothy Miell, eds. 2002. Musical Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goran Folkestad, National Identity and Music, pp. 151-162.

Melnick, J., 2009. A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song. Harvard University Press.

Negrón-Muntaner, F., 2000. Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses. Social Text, 18(2), pp.83-106.

Oja, C.J., 1994. Gershwin and American Modernists of the 1920s. The Musical Quarterly, 78(4), pp.646-668.

Oja, Carol J.; Judith Tick (2005). Aaron Copland and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Oja, Carol J. 2000. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapter 17, Europeans in Performance and On Tour, 285-297; Chapter 19, Modernism and the Jazz Age, 313-317; Critics, Chapter 20, Crossing Over with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and the Modernists, 318-360.

Ramsey, G.P., 1996. Cosmopolitan or provincial?: Ideology in early Black music historiography, 1867-1940. Black Music Research Journal, pp.11-42.

Radano, R., 2000. Hot fantasies: American modernism and the idea of black rhythm. Music and the racial imagination, pp.459-480.

Roberts, John Strom, The Latin Tinge: The impact of Latin American music on the United States, New York: Oxford University Press.