Timbre
Emily Dolan
Brown University
Fall 2019
Course Description and Goals
This seminar takes as its starting point a collection of commonplace complaints and petitions in music studies around timbre: timbre is misunderstood; it is difficult to define; it is a woefully understudied musical parameter; it lacks a standardized theory and vocabulary; it needs more systematic analysis. All this we might call the “timbral litany,” to adapt a phrase from Jonathan Sterne. At the same time—and perhaps paradoxically—with the recent publication of books, edited volumes, special issues, and conferences devoted to timbre, people have also begun to speak of timbre studies as an emerging, discrete subfield. This seminar delves into this literature in order to think critically about the idea of timbre and these struggles to understand and sometimes tame it. Our bibliography spans musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, music cognition, and sound studies. We will learn as much as we can from this diverse body of scholarship about what timbre is and can be. I particularly want to attend to the ways in which the challenges that timbre poses are, far from a hurdle, a boon. Timbre often demands historical specificity, scientific precision, and inventive analysis; it resists abstraction and begs for critical reflection. In forcing us to forego or revise our usual, traditional analytical techniques, timbre unsettles networks of disciplinary assumptions and predilections that have served to bolster some musics and people and exclude others; it is not a coincidence that talk of timbre accompanies turns to questions of race, bodies, and musics outside the Western Art Music canon. Our ultimately goal in this seminar will be not to tame timbre, but to embrace the concept in all of its complex messiness.
Course Materials
Students are asked to purchase Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Duke University Press, 2019). Paperback is $24.15. A copy of this text will also be on reserve.
Complete PDF of Syllabus with Weekly Topics here.