Compositional Concepts and Techniques (339-0-1)
Topic
Approaching the Art World
Instructors
Jay Alan Yim
847/467-2030
jaymar@northwestern.edu
Office Hours: By appointment
Jay Alan Yim has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and many other awards for his music, which has been featured at international festivals (Darmstadt, Tanglewood, Ars Musica, Wien-Modern, Gaudeamus, Huddersfield, Aspen, ISCM, ICMC) and performed by the New York Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Nederlands Radio Filharmonisch, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble SurPlus, Arditti, JACK, and Spektral Quartets, dal niente, ICE. He co-founded the intermedia collaborative 'localStyle' with Marlena Novak, and their work has been exhibited internationally (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Chicago, Eindhoven, London, Mexico City, New York, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Warsaw) in festivals, museums, galleries, and public spaces.
Meeting Info
RCMA Lower Level 113: Fri 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
One of the motivations behind this course is to foster the abilities of musicians (and students in other disciplines) to productively engage in dialogues with people in the artworld on the same terms that the artworld itself uses, and thereby enable interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and musicians.
Registration Requirements
This course is intended for both undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines or majors *besides* studio art, art theory, or art history. Students in all other fields are welcome, and there are no prerequisites except for a willingness to actively participate in class discussions, which are a crucial part of the coursework. There are no permission numbers needed nor a specific class standing in order to register for this class.
Learning Objectives
The goal of "Approaching The Artworld" (ATA) is to provide a concentrated crash course for non-artists—especially musicians (both composers and performers)—that would familiarize them with some basic structures of the art world as well as introduce them to fundamental critical approaches that constitute the basis for discourse between artists and other artists, and between artists and other members of the artworld community. That community includes curators, critics, historians, theorists, gallerists, museum directors, and others. At the center of this discourse is understanding Content: what that term means, why it is valued, how it can be identified and decoded, the strategies artists use to imbue their work with it, and the ways that other community members interpret and understand those works.
Teaching Method
Although most class meetings will take place on campus in Evanston, there will be four (4) mandatory field trips into downtown Chicago, since many of the city's premiere art venues are located there. These excursions will be opportunities to see and experience art in different contexts, and to stimulate discussion about what one is seeing, comprehending what the range of interpretations of a piece of art might be, and understanding why appreciating the viewer's reactions are important.
Evaluation Method
The course is 10 weeks long. Regular attendance and verbal participation are mandatory. There are no written assignments. However, students in the class must have read the assigned readings in advance of the class meeting when those readings will be discussed, and they must be prepared to articulate their reactions to the material in those readings.
Active and informed participation in class sessions will result in earning an "A" for that week. There will be nine (9) of these graded sessions, and the average of these will constitute the final grade for the course. There will be no midterm. There will be no final exam.
Students must attend all of the Field Trips: being present for the full duration of each Field Trip *is* the assignment for that particular week. Missing part or all of a Field Trip means that your letter grade for that day's assignment cannot possibly be an "A"; at the very best, it will be some version of a "B", but it may be lower than that.
On Field Trip Days, the class meeting will begin at 2:00pm *at the designated rendezvous point pertinent to the Field Trip location*, which means that students who wish to take this course must arrange their schedules on Fridays to allow sufficient time to travel to and arrive at the destination promptly. Students who have intervening obligations such as classes or rehearsals that conclude at or after 1:00pm on the Evanston campus should not reasonably expect to take this course successfully.
Class Materials (Required)
Assigned readings will be available as PDFs to be downloaded from Canvas:
McEvilley, Thomas Art and Discontent: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Elkins, James, How To Use Your Eyes: (selections)
Steyerl, Hito, In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective
Additional readings TBD; handouts will be provided as necessary.
Class Notes
This course draws on my accumulated experience as a practicing composer who by dint of familial relationships has found themselves embedded in the artworld for more than three decades. I have been granted the privilege of ‘observer status' and access to aspects of the artworld. Throughout all of this it has been apparent that in the main, musicians apprehend the world differently than non-musicians do, and that artists view the world differently than non-artists do. This means that even though artists and musicians may find the prospect of working together hypothetically attractive, they may not necessarily understand how each other has developed a specialized worldview, and that this can pose a barrier to the freer exchange of ideas between disciplines.