Generals Guidelines

Guidelines for the Examinations in Historical Musicology
AY 2023-2024

The general exam (“generals”) in our department is a capstone of two years of coursework, allowing you to demonstrate competency in musicology’s methods and approaches, and qualify you to move on to the research and teaching phase of the Ph.D. program.

The exams provide an opportunity for you to both broaden your interests and to deepen your knowledge in preparation for dissertation work. You will propose five fields in consultation with the faculty, fields that reflect your interests, but also range widely in terms of methodology and content.  In designing your fields, you can also explore possibilities for a dissertation.

Preparation for the exams provides an immersive experience, one in which you study with intensity and wide-ranging curiosity. Broad knowledge of both past and current musical practices is crucial to your future success as scholars, teachers, and productive members of the profession of musicology, so keep in mind that your fields should touch on diverse historical eras as well as various critical theories and methodological approaches. In writing your proposal, you should demonstrate a grasp of scholarly literature and ways and means of researching.

The exams are not meant to test your memory or recall of random facts; rather, they provide an opportunity for you to show your intellectual strengths, as well as your skills in writing, critical thinking, and oral expression.

The exams take place in the summer after your G2 year. They have four main parts:

  1. Syllabus for a 13-week undergraduate course on one of your four fields. Due June 1.
  2. Analysis (written) of two pieces of music. Take-home exam given out on a Friday in early or mid-July and returned the following Monday. We will supply pieces in each of the following four categories, and you will write analytic essays on two of them: one piece written before 1700, one from the 18th or 19th centuries, one from the 20th century or later, or one improvised or electronic piece (with recording).
  3. Written exams on four of your five fields (i.e., all except the one used for the syllabus). Writtens are a timed, in-person exam. They take place two or three weeks before the beginning of the fall semester of your third year. There will be essays and/or short answer questions; the format may vary from topic to topic. On the first day of the written exams, you will have two two-hour segments (covering 2 topics); after a day of rest, on the second day of the written exams, there will be two two-hour segments (covering 2 topics). You may bring a print-out of your bibliography and repertory list into the exam. It may be annotated, but must fit on a single sheet of paper (double-sided is okay).
  4. Oral exam (either on Zoom or in person) on all four fields, 1 1/2 hours. The exam will cover the syllabus (oral presentation), the analysis exam, plus the four fields you wrote about (the whole fields – not just the prompts for the essays). (Date TBA in the third or fourth week of August)

Fields

By March 1st of your G2 spring semester and after consulting with faculty, you will submit in final form five proposed fields of examination (at the end of this document, see “Designing Fields” for specific guidelines and due dates). When choosing your fields, please consider the following guidelines:

  • At least one field should deal with musical repertory and/or issues
    of historiography in the periods before 1800, and at least one after 1800. A transhistorical field would also fulfill this requirement.
  • One field (and not more) may be aligned with your anticipated dissertation work.

Other possibilities for your fields include:

  • A repertory, genre, or institution from a particular time and place, from any musical tradition or practice. Your field may focus on musical, analytical, ideological, historiographical issues related to this repertory.
  • A cross-disciplinary and/or critical-theoretical issue; wide latitude is given to your design for the field or fields in this category. Examples include: ecomusicology, sound studies, notation as global phenomenon; media theory/media archeology and musicology; popular music studies and race; critical improvisation studies. One aim of this/these field(s) is to bring insights and methodologies from outside musicology to bear on musicological work.
  • A field involving repertories and musical practices from global musics (outside of Western traditions of art and popular music).
  • A transhistorical field, as noted above (such as performance practice, music publishing, the role of women composers and musicians, or tracing a genre over time and across geographic borders).

Beyond these guidelines, the choice of fields is left to you, and you should strive for variety.

Each field should have both breadth and depth, and it should invest in a critical response to secondary literature. Do not be surprised if you are advised that a field is too focused and needs to be broadened. “Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory vis à vis musicology” is too narrow. “Technological determinism vis à vis musicology” (including Latour) is not. “C.P.E. Bach’s keyboard works” is too narrow. “18thc century keyboard works: performance, sensibility, and theatricality” (including C.P.E. Bach) is not. “Ernst Bloch’s aesthetics of music” is too narrow. “Cultural hermeneutics in twentieth-century music philosophy” (including Ernst Bloch) is not. “Duke Ellington’s arrangements of classical repertory” is too narrow. “Encounters: jazz and classical-music aesthetics in the 20th-century” (including Ellington) is not.

The field you choose for the syllabus should be one that you can envisage teaching in the future. Please try to balance pedagogical effectiveness and content; and remember that this is a plan for an undergraduate course (which means accommodating students with varying levels of preparation, prior knowledge, and previous experience), not a graduate seminar. Linking this field to the oral presentation is designed to allow you to demonstrate your communication skills and creativity.

Intellectual Process

As you prepare for the exams, we encourage you to reflect on your fields and think synthetically. Aim to consider questions such as: In which fields did you encounter the liveliest debates? Which fields, if any, seemed less vibrant than you perhaps expected? What methodologies did you encounter that seemed the most illuminating, revelatory, or useful? What did you read that felt like it could serve as a model for the kind of scholarship you want to carry out? What fundamentally changed your way of thinking about a particular repertory, historical period, composer, or context (e.g., geographic, political, cultural)?

The Oral Exam

Oral exams are 1.5 hours. Faculty sitting in on the exam include the musicologists, and (depending on individual students’ fields) a faculty member from music theory, ethnomusicology, cross-disciplinary music studies, and/or outside the department. We make every attempt to let you know who will examine you, but it is not always possible to determine this well in advance.

The oral exam begins with the opening segment of the class lecture based on your syllabus (10 minutes), and discussion follows (roughly 10 minutes). We then move to talking about the written essays in order, for an hour-plus. During the oral exam you may consult your bibliographies, repertory lists, and annotated copies of your written exams. At the end, you are asked to step out of the room while faculty confer. Upon being invited back, you will discuss with the faculty your overall performance in the exam.

What are the possible outcomes? “Passing” is typical. (“Pass” is also the highest possible grade.) Occasionally, we issue a provisional or partial pass and ask students to rework one or more of their written essays. These reworked essays are submitted in October (or another designated deadline), at which point a final determination is made. In extremely rare cases, we adjudge at the conclusion of the orals that, rather than being approved to go on to writing a PhD dissertation, a student will instead be awarded a Master’s degree in November.

The oral exam should be thought of as a conversation, and you are evaluated both on your knowledge and (more importantly) on your ability to think on your feet, improvise, and respond creatively to challenge. We have no interest in calling you out on trivial facts that can be discovered through a quick Google search. We will, however, often encourage you to talk about aspects of your fields that were not covered in the written essays and about the essay prompts you did not choose. Use the time between the written and oral exams to think about your essays and your fields: this is your chance for intervention and revision.

Designing Fields in the Spring Semester before Generals:

Checklist

  • You are responsible for choosing, developing, and preparing your fields, and it is essential to do so in consultation with the faculty.  By February 1st, submit a preliminary proposal for fields to the Musicology Program Advisor. Provide a title for each field, along with a c. 500-word description, which could cover what you find intriguing about it, and addresses your rationale for coverage and content.  Also include a one-page bibliography; if a particular field is oriented towards a repertory of musical works, list the pieces you consider important to know, and to analyze.
  • Preface your proposal with a statement (c. 500 words) describing an overarching rationale for your field choices, which will give the faculty a sense of your intellectual formation and any nascent ideas you may have about dissertation work.
  • During February, you will have ongoing conversations with faculty in order to revise, expand, and rebalance the fields. During this time, you will be asked to prepare a more expansive document.
  • On March 1st, submit a final version for approval (generally pro forma). Start thinking about which field will be explored in the syllabus, which is due June 1st.
  • On June 1st, submit your syllabus. We will evaluate it for content, for pedagogical feasibility, and for its potential to inspire undergraduates in thinking about and experiencing music and musical culture. Consider how your course could fit into a real-world undergraduate curriculum and what prior knowledge and interests your students are likely to bring to the experience. (Please note that you will not receive feedback on the syllabus until the oral exam.)

Syllabus Template (what to include):

  • Catalog copy: 100-word course description.
  • Course rationale: précis of aims and purposes.
  • Course schedule: list of meetings with brief description of what is covered, and list of requirements and (possible) optional assignments. Please include details about
  • weekly listening and reading assignments.
  • House rules: student obligations for the seminar, rules and regulations, criteria for grades/evaluations.
  • Instructions for written assignments: assignment suggestions, research tips, online resources, links.

Size limit: 10 pages in 12-point type.

Final tips

If you have questions about exam logistics, please speak with Nancy Shafman and Eva Kim in the department office. Also, Eva keeps a file of exams from previous years, which you are welcome to consult.

Libraries and resources. Please remember that our librarian Kerry Masteller (kmastell@fas.harvard.edu) is more than happy to help you track down online and digital materials.

Finally, please feel free to consult the Advisor in Historical Musicology (Kate van Orden, vanorden@fas.harvard.edu) or any members of the musicology faculty if you have questions along the way.