Instrument-Body
MUSC 232
Fall 2023
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
THEA 232 |
The ancient Greek word organon meant both instrument and sense organ, hence the development of a shared word in English for organ (as in a Hammond B3 organ) and organ (as in a kidney). This etymological overlap opens onto a set of generative questions into the nature of instruments: Are they inside or outside the body? Is the body an instrument? If the body is an instrument, who plays it? If an instrument is outside the body, what kind of object is it--a fetish? a prosthetic? an enhancement? an extension? a tool? a commodity? a technology?--and what does it do to the player? Can experimenting with new body-instrument relations become a pathway towards re-organ-izing the body and its relations? Instrument-Body is both a seminar and a studio course that takes these questions as a point of departure for creative and critical experimentation. We will read widely across the fields of musicology, art history, performance studies, queer studies, and critical race studies to investigate questions of instrumentality, embodiment, and technology. In addition, we will create performances across three units: "make an instrument," "break an instrument," and "make yourself an instrument." Students who already play instruments are encouraged to enroll, as are students that have no preexisting relationship to musical instruments. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA MUSC |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (MUSC)(THEA) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
¿ Curt Sachs, ¿Early Instruments: Motor Impulses: The `invention of instruments¿,¿ from The History of Musical Instruments (1940)
¿ Veronica Doubleday, ¿`Sounds of Power¿: An Overview of Musical Instruments and Gender,¿ Ethnomusicology Forum 17 (2008)
¿ Emily Dolan, ¿Toward a Musicology of Interfaces¿ from Keyboard Perspectives (2013)
¿ Ashon Crawly, ¿Nothing Music: the Hammond B3 and the Centrifugitivity of Blackpentecostal Sound¿ (2014)
¿ Immanuel Kant, excerpt from Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
¿ D. W. Winnicott, ¿Transitional Objects¿ and ¿The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications¿ from Playing and Reality (1971)
¿ Barbara Johnson, ¿Using People: Kant with Winnicott¿ from Persons and Things (2010)
¿ Sara Ahmed, ¿Orientations Toward Objects¿ from Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006)
¿ Gordon Hall, ¿Object Lessons: Thinking Gender Variance Through Minimalist Sculpture¿ from Art Journal (2013)
¿ Louis Chude-Sokei, ¿Introduction,¿ from The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2016)
¿ Saidiya Hartman, ¿Manual for General Housework,¿ from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019)
¿ Lisa Nakamura, ¿Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture,¿ from AmericanQuarterly (2014)
¿ Shoshana Zuboff, ¿Big Other and the Rise of Instrumentarian Power,¿ from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)
¿ Thomas Patteson, ¿Listening to Instruments¿ from Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism (2016)
¿ You Nakai, ¿In: The Other Side (A Likely Story),¿ ¿Amplified Piano,¿ and ¿Bandoneon!¿ from Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor¿s Music (2021)
¿ Corinne Granof, ¿`In times like this...¿: Moorman¿s Art in Context,¿ from A Feast of Astonishments (2016)
¿ Kathy O¿Dell, ¿Bomb-Paper-Ice: Charlotte Moorman and the Metaphysics of Extension,¿ from A Feast of Astonishments (2016)
¿ Joan Rothfuss, ¿Sky Kiss¿ from A Feast of Astonishments (2016)
¿ Nam June Paik, excerpts from We Are In Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik
¿ Michelle Yun, ¿Nam June Paik: Evolution, Revolution, Resolution¿ from Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot (2016)
¿ Gelsey Bell, ¿Extended vocal technique and Joan La Barbara: The relational ethics of voice on the edge of intelligibility¿ from The Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (2016)
¿ Jonathan Sterne, ¿Ballad of the dork-o-phone: Towards a crip vocal technoscience¿ from Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (2019)
¿ Jerome Ellis, ¿The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness and time¿ from Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (2020)
¿ Donna Haraway, ¿A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s¿ (1985)
¿ Legacy Russel, ¿Glitch Refuses¿ and ¿Glitch is Virus¿ from Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020)
¿ Eliot Bates, ¿Glitches, Bugs, and Hisses: The Degeneration of Musical Recordings and the Contemporary Musical Work¿ from Bad Music (2004)
¿ George Lewis, ¿In Search of Benjamin Patterson: An Improvised Journey¿ from Callaloo (2012)
¿ Vivian Huang, ¿Silence and Parasitic Hospitality in the Works of Yoko Ono, Laurel Nakadate, and Emma Sulkowicz¿ from Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (2022)
¿ Yoko Ono, excerpts from Grapefruit (1964)
¿ Fred Moten, ¿Resistance of the Object: Adrian Piper¿s Theatricality¿ from In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
¿ Adrian Piper, excerpts from Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-Art (1999)
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Examinations and Assignments:
While there will be many reading assignments, the only graded assignments are a series of four creative projects, each graded on the rigor and depth of engagement, not their artistic merits.
¿ Assignment one, Concept Map, 9/29: create an intermedial conceptual map of this first unit featuring quotations, keywords, definitions, and synthesizing reflections
¿ Assignment two, performance, 10/20: create a performance that uses a new instrument and a new technology
¿ Assignment three, performance, 11/10: create a performance that breaks an instrument
¿ Assignment four, final performance, 12/8: create a performance that makes your body into an instrument |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
The Center for the Arts will bring a series of guests to campus to be respondents for the class projects listed above, as well as to present their work to the broader Wesleyan community in a presentation-performance at the Center for the Arts directly after the Friday class. It will be expected that students enrolled in the class attend at least three of these after-class presentation-performances. Here is the proposed schedule of guests:
Week seven: 10/20
In-class workshop and after class performance and conversation with musicians Cecilia Lopez and Brandon and Cecilia Lopez, 10/20, 2pm
Week ten: 11/10
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, 11/10, 2pm
Week eleven: 11/17
In-class conversation, screening, and after class performance and conversation with performance artist Narcissister, 11/17, 4:30pm
Week thirteen: 12/8
In-class workshop and after class performance with Professor Philbrick and performer Justin Wong 12/8, 2pm
This course is listed as MUSC but will not count towards the Music Major without the permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music.
This course will count towards the THEA Major as a Theater Methods requirement. |
| Instructor(s): Philbrick,Ethan Times: .....F. 09:30AM-12:30PM; Location: DAC100; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 16 | | SR major: 3 | JR major: 3 | | |
| Seats Available: 12 | GRAD: 2 | SR non-major: 3 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 2 | FR: X |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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