3.0

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What is the future? Is it a structure of feeling? An ideology? An aesthetic orientation? A material form? A framework for action? This course explores the notion of the “future” as it has been conceived across an array of disciplines, historical actors, and cultural practices, with a focus on music as a medium for self- and world-making. Through close considerations of academic studies, artistic treatises, ideological manifestos, and musical projects which mobilize the future as either an object or lens of study, we will consider the relationship of music to anticipation, aspiration, dreaming, hope, pessimism, and utopia/dystopia. We will also experiment with imagination, speculation, and dreaming as frames for our own musical and intellectual practice. Students will produce writing in several genres (an abstract, a concert review, a conventional paper), with the option of pursuing a musical project in tandem with their final paper.