teaching

Raga is melodic structure and melodic flavor: a secret suffused with affect, image, color, and memory, disclosed through a particular way of listening. It has sustained centuries of composition and improvisational practice and inspired a vast literature of poetry, metaphysics, painting, and music theory. One conceptual puzzle runs through it all: ragas change across centuries at the hands of musicians and theorists — and yet, in the moment of performance, an invariant essence seems to emerge that transcends any particular rendition.

This seminar is an introduction to the theory and practice of Hindustani rāga. Students learn to intuitively discern the identity of common ragas, rigorously describe their differences in the language of Indian music theory, and sing or play their characteristic movements. Alongside weekly rīāz — concerted practice committed to memory through repetition — the course follows a historical survey of raga theory from the 9th-century Bṛhaddesi through the empirical school of 16th-century Vijayanagara, the Mughal Pythagoreans, the 19th-century British Theosophists, and the 20th-century nationalist modernizers, landing finally in the still-unresolved complexities of tuning, temperament, and deviant scales.

This seminar proceeds on the premise that we understand the voice better by focusing on vocal action: what voices do, rather than what "The Voice" is. Working as performers, theorists, and scholars together, we move through prosody, breath, neume, chant, unison, counterpoint, simulogue, and political speech. Each week's analytical exercise produces a single, carefully made page of diagrams and prose — a growing portfolio of collaborative vocal analysis. No vocal training required.

This seminar investigates the political dimensions of musical and sonic life, moving between political philosophy, ethnomusicology, and sound studies. Readings range from Martha Nussbaum on political emotions and Dylan Robinson on indigenous listening to close studies of nationalist devotional performance, Turkish popular music, disability protest, and the performance of political humor. Joint sessions with seminars at NYU and artist visits deepen the conversation. Students contribute weekly group notes, present as Designated Archivists of Particularities, and produce a substantial final project in a format of their choosing.

A Sufi singer brings a spiritual aspirant into a rapturous trance at a ritual gathering. A Kaluli hunter navigates by listening closely to the sounds of the rainforest. A new convert to an evangelical church learns to attune herself so that she hears God's voice every morning. Our relationship with our sonic world does not consist in passively absorbing vibrations, but depends on habits of listening — conscious and unconscious — that we develop over time.

This seminar surveys disciplined practices of listening: to music, to nature, to each other. Starting from classics of aural perception and phenomenology (al-Ghazali, Merleau-Ponty, Ihde, Berger), the course moves through ethnographic accounts of expert listening in raga, qawwali, evangelical prayer, and Sufi sama, turning finally to the ethics of empathy and alterity in musical encounter. A recurring question: what kind of person must you become to hear a particular music in a particular way?

Singing, dancing, coaxing, promising, hyping, courtship, play, debate, protest — from birth till death we find ourselves participating in spontaneous relational performance. The contours of these performances often shape the contours of our political life. In the most intense moments, participants improvise something utterly unexpected and disclose a new world of possibility.

This is a practical course in playing with the protocols of relationality. Students compose event scores that explore listening, consensus, dissensus, and vulnerability. Conceptually, the course moves between metaphysics, ethics, sociology, and the history of performance. No background in any particular discipline is necessary, but interdisciplinary curiosity will be essential.

This seminar explores where musical notation can get us: shaping musical acts, intervening in the world, guiding a listener in musical contemplation, opening conceptual and aesthetic possibilities beyond words or notes.

Students produce weekly hand-drawn notations — transcriptions, scores, diagrams, maps — working through prosody, Benedictine neumes, sargam, TUBS notation, melography, text scores, graphic notation, and Labanotation. The flowing action of the hand and pen is an important resource for thinking. The goal is to emerge with a small portfolio of musical notations that may serve as seeds of future work.

A nagaswaram player projects the sonic range of ritual space far beyond temple walls. Bells mark out community boundaries in the French countryside. The sound of chainsaws drives songbirds from their nests. African elephants align their journeys by singing at very low frequencies.

This seminar investigates sonic relationships and the complex webs that form sound environments. Drawing on acoustics, phenomenology, ethnomusicology, and ecology, students move from Kaluli rainforests to urban noise, from bioacoustics and frog calls to robin song dialects, from the sonic niche hypothesis to the politics of noise ordinances. The heart of the course is each student's ongoing ethnographic investigation of a local sound environment, presented to the seminar over the course of the semester.

Tuning is the art of adjusting tones so that they ring out in correct relationship with each other. But the art of tuning has long been something more: a way of modeling an ideal world in sound. Sima Qian's Han dynasty treatise on pitch-standards claims that the six pitch-pipes are the roots of all the myriad affairs of the world. Cicero equates musical harmony with political concord. Kepler assigns the extreme motions of the planets to positions in the octave. Anti-colonial music theorists in British India wielded equal temperament as a caricature of colonial rule.

This seminar gives students the mathematical and historical tools to understand these claims about harmonious orderings of the world. We begin from the physics of string length ratios and the ancient Chinese Sanfen Sunyi Fa method, building through just intonation, the infinite spiral of fifths, and the irrational compromises of equal temperament. We read theorists from Guan Zi to Euclid, from al-Farabi to Ramamatya, from Harry Partch to Wendy Carlos, exploring the still-contested political and cosmic visions that different tuning systems evoke. Weekly analyses, tuning experiments, and composition exercises, depending on student predilections.

The course offers a thorough introduction to ethnomusicological theory, practice, and technique — preparing students to engage the full corpus of ethnomusicological scholarship, to produce and work with field recordings, and to carry out original ethnomusicological work. Topics include performance theory, practices of listening, social formations and networks, nationalism and colonialism, urban ethnography, recording and transcription, ethnographic writing and film, and the liberatory potentials and pitfalls of experimental world music. Weekly exercises move from video analysis and field interviews to photo-essays, transcriptions, and ethnographic vignettes. The semester culminates in a substantial final project — paper, film, podcast, performance, or extended transcription — of the student's own design.

An intensive introduction to raga music. Students sing daily, learn the basics of tablā, do extensive listening, and study raga theory. We focus on khyāl, but also touch on bhakti and Sufi devotional music, film music, and Carnatic music. Students learn many things by heart, quizzes are often oral, and daily practice is central to the experience. No musical background required. Everyone sings.

Soldiers align their steps with a marching cadence. Well-behaved Parisians climb over concert hall seats to throw punches at the premiere of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. A circle of North Indian folk musicians sing a Kabir bhajan, defying the caste distinctions that divide their village. Making music brings people together, sets people apart, imparts meaning, amplifies devotion, sells products, and shapes who we are.

This writing-intensive undergraduate course examines musical ways of life from intimate domestic spaces to concert halls to social media to esoteric ritual spaces — methods of teaching and learning, the power of performance, the economics of recordings, the political weight of musical aesthetics, the ways music builds social scaffoldings of belonging. Students write three papers: a performance analysis comparing two unfamiliar concerts, a musical autobiography tracing their own enculturation, and an independent research paper.

This course focuses on the music of our home planet, and principally on the music of human beings. Within this scope, we study a broad range of musical practices: raga, qawwali, bhakti song, Hindi film music, Afro-Cuban rhythm, Sufi devotional music, polyphony, tuning systems, and experimental improvisation. Students learn to read sargam notation, practice rhythmic patterns, attend live performances, and develop the analytical tools to make unfamiliar musics familiar, and familiar musics unfamiliar.

No particular musical background is required. Students will make music together frequently throughout the course.