Undergraduate Courses

This one-quarter course is designed to enrich the listening experience of students, particularly with respect to the art music of the Western European and American concert tradition. Students are introduced to the basic elements of music and the ways that they are integrated to create works in various styles. Particular emphasis is placed on musical form and on the potential for music to refer to and interact with aspects of the world outside.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This introductory course in music is intended for students who are interested in exploring the language, interpretation, and meaning of music through coordinated listening, analysis, and creative work. By listening to and comprehending the structural and aesthetic considerations behind significant written and improvised works, from the earliest examples of notated Western music to the music of living composers and performers, students will be prepared to undertake analytical and ultimately creative projects. The relationship between cultural and historical practices and the creation and reception of music will also be considered. The course is taught by a practicing composer, whose experience will guide and inform the works studied. No prior background in music is required.

This course aims to develop students' analytical and critical tools by focusing on a select group of works drawn from the Western European and American concert tradition. The texts for the course are recordings. Through listening, written assignments, and class discussion, we explore topics such as compositional strategy, conditions of musical performance, interactions between music and text, and the relationship between music and ideology as they are manifested in complete compositions.

This course is for everyone interested in connecting performativity with sound and music making. Through a hands-on workshop format, students combine research on live performance methodologies—such as text scores, graphic scores, and improvisation across acoustic and electronic sources, as well as non-Western and non-notated approaches to performance—with the study of performativity theories. The course emphasizes practical and critical exploration of social, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of sound practices, enabling students to develop, present, and critically discuss new and experimental work that integrates these approaches. We will have critical listening sessions, regular work-in-progress and improvisation sessions, and open strategies for notating and documenting sound-based performances.

The first quarter focuses on fundamentals: scale types, keys, basic harmonic structures, voice-leading and two-voice counterpoint. Musicianship labs in ear training and keyboard skills required.

The second quarter explores extensions of harmonic syntax, the basics of classical form, further work with counterpoint, and nondiatonic seventh chords. Musicianship labs in ear training and keyboard skills required.

The third quarter undertakes the study of modulation, sequences, and additional analysis of classical forms. Musicianship labs in ear training and keyboard skills required.

This course is geared toward students who would like to improve their music literacy skills and strengthen their overall musicianship through intensive sight-singing practice. In this supportive environment, we will explore not only a wide range of musical concepts (including rhythm, meter, musical symbols, note-names, solfege, scales, intervals, and harmony), but we’ll also learn to recognize common pitfalls, tackle anxiety surrounding sight-reading, and learn to trust our instincts so that we may keep pushing forward after faltering. This course will sharpen students’ aural skills as we work on listening and notating what we hear. We will go beyond the confines of Western Classical traditions to explore other systems of musical notation, and learn how singing music from oral traditions can help us to become stronger musicians.

Note: This course is recommended for students who have had at least some experience singing or playing an instrument, but who wish to strengthen their skills and confidence. Students should be able to match pitch.

This course explores research in the mind and brain sciences that helps us to understand how we understand music. Although a portion of the material we cover will relate quite directly to what happens when we listen to music, other readings and topics will concern some of the more-general cognitive capacities that humans recruit to make sense of the sounds they hear. One challenge, then, will be to come to terms with what we have learned from research in music psychology and music cognition, which often involves relatively technical explorations of how musical sounds are organized. A second challenge will be to consider what research that isn’t as directly related to music—research, for instance, on analogical processes, the motor system, or gesture—can tell us about how we organize our understanding of the sounds we associate with music. The class is organized around selected readings—spanning both empirical research and more speculative work—that will provide a basis for class discussions, lectures, and brief writing assignments. There will also be ample opportunity to explore how these readings inform our understanding of specific musical pieces, which can help us to both understand and critique a range of approaches to music and mind.

Instructor: Fiona Boyd

This seminar examines the foundational role of Black sound and artistry in country music, from the genre’s pre-histories in West Africa and the Caribbean, to its multiracial and multicultural present across the United States and the world. With a particular focus on Black American country musicians and their experiences of place, belonging, and Americanness, we will think and listen alongside scholars and artists who examine intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class in their work, who employ a diversity of methodological approaches across music studies, and who ask questions about genre, industry, collectivity, nationalism, fandom, place, and labor. Throughout the course, we will expand our listening skills and explore how the study of music and sound can illuminate our social and cultural understandings, in turn redefining what we consider country music and Black music to be. The course will culminate in a final project designed to prompt students to reflect on the sounds, skills, issues, concepts, and methodologies discussed in the course, and to explore a research question related to Black country music. This course is open to students with no formal training or background in music.

Bob Dylan (b. 1941) is one of the most celebrated artists of the postwar era, a musician who revolutionized popular songwriting, whose lyrics won him a Nobel Prize in Literature, and whose idiosyncratic voice and performance style have thrilled his fans—and baffled everyone else—for over six decades. Now, as a result of the film A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet, a new generation is discovering Dylan’s music. In 2020, he released one of his most critically acclaimed albums in years. His mystique, allure, and enigma show no sign of waning; he continues to perform prolifically in this, his 86th year.

What makes Bob Dylan tick? Why has his curious combination of highly ambitious lyrics and ramshackle music making so captivated so many? This course addresses those questions, focusing on both famous tracks and deep cuts, with a particular emphasis on the ways his songs change in performance. We will engage Dylan’s music as carefully as we do his words, but no formal music training is required for the course.

This course provides an introduction to ethnomusicology and related disciplines with an emphasis on the methods and contemporary practice of social and cultural analysis. The course reviews a broad selection of writing on non-Western, popular, vernacular, and "world-music" genres from a historical and theoretical perspective, clarifying key analytical terms (i.e., "culture," "subculture," "style," "ritual," "globalization") and methods (i.e., ethnography, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism). In the last part of the course, students learn and develop component skills of fieldwork documentation and ethnographic writing.

This course explores the music and sound of popular Hindi cinema from aesthetic, social, cultural, economic, historical, and political perspectives. Students will be introduced to the musical conventions and practices of the genre, and to changes in Bollywood musical style over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will watch select films with keen attention to music’s imbrication with cinematic visuality, narrative, technology, and dance, and with consideration of issues like emplacement, gender, caste, religion, capitalism, nationalism, and transnationalism. Bollywood is a cosmopolitan music, drawing from and contributing to a range of regional and international music practices; we also venture into some of those streams.

Each May since 1956 popular musicians and fans from Europe gather in a European metropolis to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), a competitive spectacle in which musicians from one nation compete against one another. Organized, funded, and broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union, the largest conglomerate of national radio and television networks in the world, the ESC is extensively participatory, creating its own communities of fans, musicians, musical producers, and ordinary citizens, who join together at all levels of society to interact with the politics and historical narratives of Europe. From the moment of heightened Cold War conflict at the birth of ESC to the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the present, ESC has generated public discourse that not only reflects European and global politics, but provides a conduit for local and national citizenries to respond and shape such public discourse about gender and sexuality. The weekly work for the course draws students from across the College into the counterpoint of history and politics with aesthetics and popular culture. Each week will be divided into two parts, the first dedicated to reading and discussion of texts about European history and politics from World War II to the present, the second to interaction with music. Students will experience the ESC through close readings of individual songs and growing familiarity with individual nations with a participatory final project.

This course has as its focus the varied social agents, discourses, processes and institutions that contribute to current and historical understandings of rock. Issues of
musical style, questions of historiography, the technologies and techniques of audio recording, the structures of the recording industry, the status of so-called subcultures and mainstreams, and the politics of gender, race and sexuality are among the items which our readings, class discussions and assignments will explore. As such, the inculcation of an “appreciation” of rock, the transmission of a canon and the validation of individual musical tastes are projects that are antithetical to our inquiry. Students will also be encouraged, through select readings and listening assignments, to contextualize rock within a broad field of twentieth- and twenty-first century music-making and attendant social, political and economic processes.

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

“Opera without Borders” explores how markers of race, indigeneity, and other identities blur historical time and disrupt geopolitical space on the operatic stage. How does opera operate in the new arenas of cosmopolitan citizenship during our present historical moment, when the unitary monoliths of nations, citizens, and identities are no longer firmly in place and means of travel and communication are quickly transforming? How and why have patterns of exploration, trade, and migration, forced and voluntary, colonial and decolonial, generated new operatic genres, new means of operatic production, and new kinds of opera producers (librettists, composers, directors, choreographers, dramaturgs, etc.)? 

Among our cases are the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Orphan of Zhao (2012); the Paris Opera’s hiphop staging of Rameau’s Les indes galantes (2019); Schikaneder and Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791) reimagined as Impempe Yomlingo (2007-2011) by the township artists of Capetown; and circulations of Cantonese opera in Chinatowns from Vancouver and San Francisco to New York and Honolulu.

This course engages students in a quarter-long music ethnography project documenting the music and sound practices of sacred communities on Chicago’s South Side. Students will gain practical experience in ethnomusicological methods such as participant observation, interviewing, oral history, archival and digital research, fieldnote writing, sound recording, and collaborative representation. Working in teams, students will create micro-documentaries highlighting the sound practices of sacred communities. The course will culminate in a digital map showcasing the sound practices of South Side communities. This map will serve as a visual representation and digital archive of local musicking and cultural diversity, in support of local music communities.

This course focuses on the compositional norms of the "galant" and "high classical" styles of the eighteenth century, especially the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. We will approach this repertoire from different angles, engaging literature on Formenlehre, schema theory, rhythm and meter, and topic theory. Ultimately, we will explore how conventions and deviations thereof participate in the construction of musical meaning and expression.

This course introduces theoretical and analytical approaches to twentieth-century music. The core of the course involves learning a new theoretical apparatus--often called "set theory"--and exploring how best to apply that apparatus analytically to pieces by composers such as Schoenberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky. We also explore the relevance of the theoretical models to music outside of the high-modernist canon, including some jazz. The course provides an opportunity to confront some foundational questions regarding what it means to "theorize about music."

For decades, popular music has been the soundtrack to many Americans’ lives. This class explores the structure, function, and impact of a range of vernacular musics from the 20th and 21st centuries. Our approach to popular music will be by turns historical, analytical, and sociological. Students will learn about formal designs of pop songs, from verse-chorus to much more elaborate structures, along with antecedents in the Great American Songbook tradition. Students will learn to analyze the harmonic and melodic conventions in various genres, and also spend significant time with groove analysis and design. Finally, the class will interrogate the sociological relevance of vernacular musics, weaving in discussions of relevant social issues from radio play to popularity, and from subcultural appeal to racial identity. This class is open to anyone who listens carefully and with passion, and who wants to grow their ability to write about music. Experience as a practitioner of any type of music and/or a passing knowledge of music theory will be helpful, but it is not necessary to read notated music for this course.

How do listeners perceive musical meter? How do composers manipulate rhythm for expressive purposes? How do performers modify notated rhythms? Why does music make us move? These questions have motivated an extensive body of recent research in music theory and cognition, after a long-standing focus on the domain of pitch. Students will engage with this literature through reading and music analysis, to learn about rhythmic and metrical structures in music—from baroque dance to hip-hop.

Disability is often an afterthought, an unexpected tragedy to be mitigated, accommodated, or overcome. In cultural, political, and educational spheres, disabilities are non-normative, marginal, even invisible. This runs counter to many of our lived experiences of difference where, in fact, disabilities of all kinds are the "new normal." In this interdisciplinary course, we center both the category and experience of disability. Moreover, we consider the stakes of explicitly designing for different kinds of bodies and minds. Rather than approaching disability as a problem to be accommodated, we consider the affordances that disability offers for design.

This course begins by situating us in the growing discipline of Disability Studies and the activist (and intersectional) Disability Justice movement. We then move to four two-week units in specific areas where disability meets design: architecture, infrastructure, and public space; education and the classroom; economics, employment, and public policy; and aesthetics. Traversing from architecture to art, and from education to economic policy, this course asks how we can design for access.

The Blues set the template for American popular music in the twentieth century. But its influence was felt across all corners of the arts, and beyond. In this class, we will explore the musical history of the Blues, from its roots in the US South, through the Chicago of the Great Migration, to its explosion across the globe. But we will do so in tandem with considering its tremendous cultural reach: in literature, philosophy, art, and film. We will examine how poets like Langston Hughes found in the Blues a new poetic language; how philosophers and political thinkers like Amiri Baraka, Albert Murray, and Angela Davis found a powerful social analytic; how artists like Archibald Motely and Romare Bearden spun music into a new visual language; and how filmmakers—most recently Ryan Coogler—turned to the mythology of the Blues to reanimate the Southern Gothic in Hollywood. Across these domains and more, we will consider how the Blues—as sound and idea—became a cypher for notions of race, class, and respectability in twentieth-century culture, and how these notions continue to play out in the present day.

Designed for beginning composers to practice and hone the nuances of their musical craft, this course introduces some of the fundamentals of music composition through a series of exercises as well as several larger creative projects. Professional musicians will perform students’ exercises and compositions.

This is primarily a creative, composing course. Through a combination of composition assignments, listening, discussion, analysis, and reading, we will explore and practice the fundamental aspects of music composition. Repertoire study, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, orchestration, timbre, form, transformation, and several other pertinent essentials are included in the curriculum. This laboratory-style, practical course is interactive and discussion-based.