Research in Humanities: Music

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DURHAM CAMPUS

About Research in Music ("RMusic")

Every history of music textbook makes a choice about what to include and what to exclude. This interdisciplinary research seminar challenges the traditional musical "Canon" by asking: Who is missing, and why does their absence distort our understanding of culture?

Students will explore how music intersects with power, gender, race, and philosophy, moving beyond standard historical narratives to conduct original, boundary-pushing humanities research.

COMMON QUESTIONS

What would I do in the program?

The Canon Critique: Identify marginalized voices, forgotten performance traditions, or erased cultural movements within a specific musical subfield.
Primary Source "Urtext" Hunting: Research in this course goes far beyond basic searches. Students will track down primary source materials unique to their topics—whether that means accessing classical archival scores, analyzing uncompressed studio audio stems, deciphering HBCU drumline cadence books, or exploring DAW project files for internet-native artists.
Digital Curation: Explore how interactive media (audio overlays, spatial maps, hyperlinked scores) can make hidden histories visible to modern readers.
Research in Translation: Each student is required to utilize at least one research source (ideally primary) that is in a different language. The instructor can assist in translating French, German, Italian and Spanish.

To conduct this level of original scholarship, students will engage directly with the digital reading rooms and special collections of the world's most prestigious institutions. We will navigate international repositories—including the Library of Congress (LOC), the British Library (BL), and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)—to uncover historical manuscripts, rare field recordings, and original musical blueprints. For specialized performance histories and composer autographs, students will delve into the archives of The Juilliard School and the New York Public Library (NYPL) for the Performing Arts. Furthermore, students will cross-reference these primary artifacts using powerful open-access academic databases like Persée and JSTOR to ground their discoveries in sophisticated, peer-reviewed cultural critique.

How do I know this program is a good fit for me?

Whether you are a classical performer, a digital beat producer, a participant in a specific cultural music tradition, or simply a deep, analytical listener, this course is designed for any student willing to rigorously investigate the cultural and historical impact of music.

What projects have past / current students worked on?

Research in Humanities: Music is NEW in Durham this year!

Be a part of our first research class and have your projects listed here soon.

HAVE QUESTIONS?

Contact the Instructor

DURHAM CAMPUS

Chad Cygan, Instructor of Mathematics

chad.cygan@ncssm.edu

Chad Cygan joined NCSSM’s Humanities Department and Fine Arts Program in August 2020 as an experienced choral director, instructor of voice, guitar and piano, and an active performer. Chad has served as faculty at the Juilliard School, City College (NY), Maine South High School, Ohlone College, the Amherst Early Music Festival, and many other organizations. As a performer Chad has sung with the Metropolitan Opera, Opera San Jose, Utopia Opera, the Juilliard Choral Union, the Oratorio Society of New York, and Opera Cooperative. He is an active musical theatre vocal coach and a sound designer for video game music. He utilizes technology and artificial intelligence in his course design. Chad completed his bachelor’s in music education (Illinois) and master’s in music (Juilliard), and will complete his doctorate in musical arts at the Graduate Center (CUNY) this academic year. His students have matriculated to the Juilliard School, NYU (Tisch and Steinhardt), University of Michigan, UCLA, Stanford, Harvard and many other institutions.

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