Shepherd School of Music

The last time Joan La Barbara was living in Philly, she was working with a local voice teacher on “The Bell Song” aria from Leo Delibe’s Lakmé, a signature coloratura soprano showpiece. Since then, her repertoire and vocal techniques have significantly shifted.The composer, singer, and actor is known for her iconic experimental vocal practices, which she created alongside some of the most celebrated composers in American new music, including  John Cage, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Larry Austin, Peter Gordon, Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, and her husband Morton Subotnick. She will return to Philadelphia on September 28th to perform the program “Voice is the Original Instrument” at Annenberg Center Live at 8.00pm. Pre-concert talk at 7.00pm.

Anohni’s 2016 album HOPELESSNESS ruminates on feelings of hopelessness in the wake of climate change, domestic surveillance, and geopolitical instability. This chapter considers Ahonhi’s critiques of power through the “Trojan horse” effect of the album, specifically her use of the language of popular music and positioning herself and listeners as both enactors and objects of violence, desire, and control. Through a close analysis of the songs “4 Degrees” and “Watch Me,” this chapter demonstrates how Anohni mobilizes the political potential of irony and the compelling ethos of the confessional genre to implicate listeners—an inventive approach to communicating politics with revolutionary possibilities.

In The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Practices of Listening (NYU), Sounding Out! Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Lynn Stoever (SUNY Binghamton) excavates an archive that spans a century of audio-visual materials, performance reviews, and African American literature to present the relationship between the sonics of race and the historical racialization of listening. Stoever engages black performers and writers as theorists of listening to demonstrate how listening can serve as a mode of decolonization. In August, Maria Murphy (University of Pennsylvania) spoke with Stoever about the politics of voicing and listening, sound studies, and how Colin Kaepernick hears the national anthem.

What does it mean to have a voice? To raise your voice? To have your voice heard? What do our voices say about us and what do they fail to communicate? How we speak and how our voices are perceived impact our interactions in daily life, our participation in the political sphere, and our capacity to effect change through activism. In conjunction with Communication Within the Curriculum, this course explores the parameters by which voice is defined in the context of music and sound studies, social justice, philosophy, and media and communication studies. We will consider how voice embodies our political constitution through an examination of various operatic and art song repertoires; the vocal practices of artists such as Tanya Tagaq, Anohni, Juliana Huxtable, Laurie Anderson, Sikh Knowledge, and Lucas Silveira; the phenomena of voice-activated devices such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo; and the collective voices of movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors. No previous musical training required. May be used toward Music minor requirement and counts for Cultural Diversity in the U.S. requirement.

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies with a focus on the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, delimit opportunities for groups and individuals, and impact lived experiences. Using an intersectional lens, this course will cover the material and social constructions and productions of sex and gender and the power dynamics that drive and structure gendered social orders. We will aim to strengthen our analyses of what is present/current through historical context and attention to intellectual genealogies. While primarily situated in the U.S. context, the course also asks students to reflect on transnational interconnections, recognizing that the power structures that shape gender, race, and class in the United States do not exist in isolation. This class counts toward the Cultural Diversity in the United States and Society Sector requirements.

This course explores the ways in which gender manifests differently in a variety of cultural and national contexts and the impact of globalization on gendered social relationships. Gender indicates the ways in which our social lives are organized around gender binaries-in relation to work, family, sexuality, crime, culture, and nation-state. Globalization indicates the transfer of economic and cultural goods (capital, goods, people, ideas, militaries, cultures, media, diseases, ecologies, and more) between nations and people. Questions we will explore include: What are some of the histories and hierarchies of gender and globalization? What is globalization and how do different children, women, men, transgender and non-binary people experience it differently? How are wages, compensation, and value negotiated in the global labor market? How does immigration affect families? How different are experiences of women in the "Third World" from those of women in the "First World," why, and where do these terms come from? We will explore these issues and others by reading critical scholarship, watching films/documentaries, and engaging in classroom discussion. The course will take an intersectional approach by considering how gender intersects with other social categories such as race, religion, class, sexuality, age, ability, and nationhood in a range of geographic contexts.

Sexual Differences in the Cinema/Gender in the Cinema

Laura Mulvey's pathbreaking article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" identified how visual representation constructs the concept of woman and determines how "the meaning of woman is sexual difference." How does the medium of cinema conceive of women as "to-be-looked-at"? And how do other cinematic trends define, produce, and shape our understandings of gender and difference more broadly? This class takes up the social and political production of sexual difference and its relationship with feminism. With special attention to sexual difference in relation to sexuality, race, and class, we will examine fundamental and more recent texts in feminist film theory with readings of Hollywood films, independent films, international films, short films, and documentary films. We will critique ideological assumptions that are created, reinforced, and subverted in a variety of films while building skills to analyze cinematic techniques, genres, and forms, including developing technical language to discuss cinematography, film grammar, sound design, mise-en-scène, narrative, etc.

In 2016, Maria Murphy and Roksana Filipowska set up Listening (to) Cyborgs, a collaborative media archaeology lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, Maria Murphy delves into what it means to work at the intersection of theory and practice, and how doing so has informed her research on Laurie Anderson.

We investigate the use of modularity as a quantifier of whole-brain functional networks. Brain networks are constructed from functional magnetic resonance imaging while subjects listened to auditory pieces that varied in emotivity and cultural familiarity. The results of our analysis reveal high and low modularity groups based on the network configuration during a subject's favorite song, and this classification can predict network reconfiguration during the other auditory pieces. In particular, subjects in the low modularity group show significant brain network reconfiguration during both familiar and unfamiliar pieces. In contrast, the high modularity brain networks appear more robust and only exhibit significant changes during the unfamiliar music and speech. We also find differences in the stability of module composition for the two groups during each auditory piece. Our results suggest that the modularity of the whole-brain network plays a significant role in the way the ne...