Spring

This course provides a historical, theoretical, and practical introduction to aesthetic technologies of sound. Open to students in Music, DOVA, TAPS, and MAAD, this course is geared toward a broad spectrum of creators including material musicians, mixed-media artists, dramaturges, game designers, etc. who use sound in their artistic practice. The course will include a historical overview of the porous relationship between sound and music from the birth of electricity, futurism, and Dada to recent conceptions and innovations of the sonic arts in computer music, intermedia, installations, gaming, and performance art. 

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. 

The Maqam Chamber Course gives instrumentalists and vocalists the opportunity to explore maqam repertoire, theory, improvisation, and performance practices through a hands-on approach. Students in this course study maqam, the microtonal modal and phrasing system used in throughout North Africa, Southwest Asia, and Transcaucasia. Students meet on a weekly basis to learn and practice repertoire from these regions, with a focus on interpretation, ornamentation, extended techniques and improvisation skills. Through group rehearsals and exercises, students acquire skills necessary to contribute within a small ensemble setting.

The composition seminar is a weekly session designed for undergraduate students in composition lessons. It is an open forum for composers to listen to recent music, including their own, and to discuss issues connected with trends, esthetics, and compositional techniques. The entire composition faculty takes part in these sessions. The composition seminar often hosts well-known visiting composers whose works are performed in the city by various groups or ensembles, as well as performers specializing in new music and contemporary techniques.

Students may enroll in this course more than once as an elective, but it may be counted only once towards requirements for the music major or minor. Students must also register for MUSI 24100, Seminar: Composition. 

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 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. 

In this course, we will interrogate the historical role of opera in consolidating, sustaining, and challenging colonial empires over the past four centuries. How was the growth and development of opera as a cultural institution affected by European expansionism? Does opera, like settler colonialism, have a special kinship with secular modernity? What can quintessentially operatic figures like the castrato, the diva, and the tragic heroine/femme fatale tell us about foreign, queer, or otherwise non-normative identities under systems of coloniality? And what social, cultural, or political roles can opera fill in the era of global/late/post-industrial capitalism? Inspired by recent trends in global music history; Black, Asian, and indigenous opera studies; as well as contemporary operatic productions and their critical responses, we will consider: exoticist and Orientalist tropes and racial costuming; exportation, adoption, and adaptation of European opera across the globe; depictions, explorations, and transgressions of the gender frontier; and postcolonial and hybrid re-interpretations and stagings of works from the operatic canon.

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.

This one-quarter elective course covers the basic elements of music theory, including music reading, intervals, chords, meter, and rhythm.