MUSI

MUSI 25422 Hearing Popular Music

(MAAD 12422)

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Theory

MUSI 24100 Composition Seminar

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 24000/34000 Composition Lessons

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

MUSI 26100 and MUSI 26200 (26200 can be taken concurrently with 24000)
MUSI 15100, 15200 and 15300
Consent of instructor

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 24000/34000 Composition Lessons

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

MUSI 26100 and MUSI 26200 (26200 can be taken concurrently with 24000)
MUSI 15100, 15200 and 15300
Consent of instructor

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 23517/335176 Music of the Caribbean

(LACS 23517/LACS 33517)

This course covers the sonic and structural characteristics, as well as the social, political, environmental, and historical contexts of Caribbean popular and folk music. These initial inquiries will give way to the investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that are particularly important to an understanding of the Caribbean and its people. Specifically, we will think through the ways in which creolization, hybridity, colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism, and migration inform and shape music performance and consumption in the region and throughout its diaspora. In this course, participants will listen to many different styles and repertoires of music, ranging from calypso to kumina, from reggaeton to bachata, and from dancehall to zouk. We will also examine how the Caribbean and its music are imagined and engaged with globally by focusing attention on how and why music from that region has traveled and been adopted and adapted by numerous ethnic and religious “others.”

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 23300 Introduction to the Social and Cultural Study of Music

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 23100/33100 Jazz

This survey charts the history and development of jazz from its earliest origins to the present. Representative recordings in various styles are selected for intensive analysis and connected to other musics, currents in American and world cultures, and the contexts and processes of performance. The Chicago Jazz Archive in Regenstein Library provides primary source materials.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 15100 Harmony and Voice Leading I

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Theory

MUSI 10400 Intro to Music: Analysis and Criticism

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Theory

MUSI 10400 Intro to Music: Analysis and Criticism

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Theory
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