Expressive Culture | 2021-2022

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 700, Expressive Culture: Topics—Ancient Africa, Art and Archaeology
Prof. Howley (Institute of Fine Arts)     [Syllabus]  
Africa is often depicted as a land without history. Nothing could be further from the case. In fact, the traces of human cultural expression—art, architecture, and objects, or what together might be called the built environment—stretch back tens of thousands of years across the whole continent, and demonstrate the important role that artistic production had in ancient African societies. We survey major archaeologically-attested African cultures and critically evaluate the impact that modern histories of Euro-American colonial involvement with Africa have had, and continue to have, on the popular understan ding of the complexity and importance of ancient African cultures. Attention is paid to the work of African scholars, post-colonial approaches that center the needs and interests of local populations, and the challenges archaeologists face as they attempt to reconstruct the ancient African past.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 711, Expressive Culture: The Graphic Novel
Prof. Borenstein (Russian and Slavic Studies)       [Syllabus]
Examines the interplay between words and images in the graphic novel, a hybrid medium with a system of communication reminiscent of prose fiction, animation, and film. What is the connection between text and art? How are internal psychology, time, and action conveyed in a static series of words and pictures? What can the graphic novel convey that other media cannot? Authors include Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Peter Milligan, Charles Burns, Carla Speed McNeil.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 722, Expressive Culture: Architecture in New York Field Study
Prof. Broderick (Art History)       [Syllabus]
New York's rich architectural heritage offers a unique opportunity for firsthand consideration of the concepts and styles of modern urban architecture, as well as its social, financial, and cultural contexts. Meets once a week for an extended period combining on-campus lectures with group excursions to prominent buildings. Attention is given both to individual buildings as examples of 19th- and 20th-century architecture and to phenomena such as the development of the skyscraper and the adaptation of older buildings to new uses.

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Oliver (Music)     [Syllabus]   
Think about your favorite music, musician, song, and then think about the technologies that make them and your listening possible: microphones, recording studios, CDs, mp3 files, musical instruments, speakers, iPods, etc. Are these technologies essential to this music? Are they circumstantial? Some musical practices seem, at least at first sight, non-technological; others are overtly technological and use screens, speakers, computers, and other gadgets, as central aspects of their music. Focusing on experimental electronic and computer music and a diverse range of popular music produced in the 20th and 21st Century, we ask: What is music? What is sound? What is noise? What is music technology? Is music inherently technological? Is technology expressive?

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Teyssier (Music)      [Syllabus]
Sound and Science. From the sonification of Covid-19’s amino acid combinations to detecting black holes, contemporary science makes frequent use of sound as a tool to explore the universe. Sound seems to grant both a direct and intuitive access to natural phenomena and to capture the ineffable, temporal boundedness of life itself. These qualities, however, have also been sound’s weakness, whose subjective and elusive nature often put it at odds with science’s standards of objectivity. An ambivalent tool for science, sound is also a challenging object of study because of its tendency to escape established modes of observation. We examine the entwined histories of sound and science by considering both the role of sound in the sciences and the sciences of sound. We consider the multifaceted relation between sound and science both from the perspective of a broad range of academic disciplines, including biology, psychology, phonetics, musicology, and environmental studies; as well as fields of practice, from car repair and speech therapy, to instrument making and the development of telecommunications; and approach a great variety of sonic phenomena, ranging from music and speech, to natural soundscapes and fictional sounds. 

FALL 2021 CORE-UA 750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Polan (Cinema Studies)    [Syllabus]        
Howard Hawks was a consummate director of action film. Working in genres such as the western, the war film, the detective story, and the adventure tale, Hawks crafted engaging narratives of men on a mission working together, their endeavor externalized into dramas of physicality, of bodies on the line, and rendered through a clean, tight cinema focused on movement, men’s corporeal craft, and team-work. This body of work is balanced, or perhaps even challenged, by a set of other Hawks films focusing on energetic, adventurous women who subvert masculine supremacy and even show up men as infantile about violence, rough play, and machismo.  A musical like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes shows weak men at the mercy of over-the-top powerful women, while a screwball comedy like I Was a Male War Bride centers on a demasculinized man who spends much of the film in drag. We examine these contrasts in Hawks’ films: masculine action versus feminine challenges to male empowerment, stories of action versus critiques of violence as simplistic solution. The content of Hawks’ films is also considered against issues of style and cinematic expression: what resources of crisp story-telling does he employ to convey tales of men in action, and how are these undone in the comedies and musicals? Looking at Hawks’ specific place in the Hollywood studio system, we see him as a case study of how American narrative film functioned thematically and stylistically as popular art.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 720, Expressive Culture: Images—New York Avant-Garde
Prof. Silver (Art History)       [Syllabus]
Avant-Garde New York, from the Armory Show to Andy Warhol. New York emerged as the center of avant-garde art making in the period just after the World War II, although the city had preparing for its modernist ascendancy since the early years of the 20th century. We focus on the artists—native New Yorkers and out-of-towners, Americans and foreign-born practitioners—who helped to shape and refine New York’s extraordinarily rich avant-garde “tradition.” We study significant painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, graphic artists and designers in the context in which their work came into being and flourished—museums, galleries, art schools, patrons, salons, neighborhoods, professional organizations, ad hoc associations, and artist “hangouts.” Topics include: the Stieglitz Circle and 291; The Armory Show (1913); Marcel Duchamp and New York Dada; the Paris/New York connection; the founding of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum; New York Street Photography; Avant-gardism in Washington Square: from the “Republic of Greenwich Village” to the birth of Abstract Expressionism and the Judson Dance Theater and Gallery; and the crossing-over of Pop Art, from Madison Avenue to 57th Street.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 725, Expressive Culture: Architecture
Prof. Maxwell (Institute of Fine Arts)      [Syllabus]
Architecture and Meaning in the Middle Ages. The world watched helplessly on April 15, 2019, as the cathedral of Paris burned, feeling great sadness, even if we didn’t fully grasp the profound sorrow and loss shouldered by French citizens. How could we understand the full range of meanings this building has for them? It was the loss of a beautiful building, yes, but also the loss of a historical site of Christian worship and a monument of national pride and memory. Notre-Dame is, in many ways, a symbol of and for France. This tragic moment was a reminder of just how deeply buildings, even those of the distant past, continue to shape our understanding of ourselves today. To appreciate the meaning of pre-modern buildings we start with an introduction to the built environment of the Middle Ages, from the fall of Rome to the dawn of the Renaissance, becoming familiar with the architectural traditions of the great cathedrals, revered pilgrimage churches, and reclusive monasteries of western Europe, as well as castles, houses, and other civic structures. To understand the ways in which the built environment affected contemporary audiences and shaped medieval life, we also consider medieval culture, exploring the role of pilgrimage, courts and civil authority, religious reform and radicalism, crusading and social violence, and rising urbanism. Throughout, we reflect on how medieval architecture is still present with us today—whether through medieval revivals (New York’s St. Patrick or St. John the Divine), museum exhibitions (we visit the Met’s Cloisters Museum), or tragedies such as that of 2019.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Terry (Music)      [Syllabus]
The rhythmic revolution that took place starting from Machito and his Afro-Cubans in the 1940’s changed the course of American music forever. It became an integral part of the American soundscape. In order to understand the evolution of Cuban music, we begin with Cuba’s social structures, complex immigration history, and cultural heritage. We cover the many genres of Cuban music that grew out of this mixture of history and social conditions, and an anatomy of the sounds that identify the various genres of Cuban music. Students become acquainted with these different musical styles and traditions, and develop an understanding of the role of beat, syncopation, and melodic counterpoint in Cuban music and attend performances of Cuban music in the NYC area when possible.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Daughtry (Music)       [Syllabus]
Jazz in New York. Over the course of the past hundred years, jazz has been framed variously as an erotic display, a symbol of modernity, an essential expression of the African American soul, the sound of the Black avant-garde, “America’s classical music,” a form of musical cosmopolitanism, a decadent type of bourgeois entertainment, a virtuosic art form, a revolting noise, a radical performance of democracy and freedom, and elevator music. Jazz is, in other words, complicated—its densely textured sound world is entwined with a complex social history. Focusing largely on music made in New York City, the undisputed global capital of the genre, we listen to recordings, compare notes on the music, work with archival sources, meet musicians, attend concerts, screen films, and read a broad array of jazz scholarship and journalism. We dig deep into the history of jazz in the city, and also explore the strange and delightful new shapes jazz is taking in the 21st century.

SPRING 2022 CORE-UA 750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Streible (Cinema Studies)        [Syllabus]
A history of film from the medium’s beginnings in the 1890s through the early 1930s, a period often said to be synonymous with “silent movies.” But during those thirty-plus years, moviegoers experienced live musical accompaniment with most every screening. Our weekly screenings feature a combination of live music, newly recorded scores by NYU Screen Scoring students, and music from DVD releases. In roughly chronological order, we consider aspects of film history—aesthetic, technological, industrial, social, and cultural—with special concern for the music (along with other sounds) played with each film. We look at several national cinemas and the international circulation of films, and study: precursors of cinematic technology, the earliest forms of cinema, development of narrative film, battles to control screen content, emergence of classical film style, studio and star systems, movie exhibition, as well as nonfiction, experimental, and amateur categories of film. We also consider ways in which works of silent-era cinema have been continually reused and revisited, particularly as the 2020s have brought new access to rediscovered films and high-quality restorations of both classic movies and works that force us to reassess what we thought we knew about silent cinema.