MUSI

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.

This course focuses on the knowledge necessary to improvise over the chord changes of standard jazz tunes. We cover basic terminology and chord symbols, scale-to-chord relationships, connection devices, and turn-around patterns. For the more experienced improviser, we explore alternate chord changes, tritone substitutions, and ornamentations. Using techniques gained in class, students write their own solos on a jazz tune and transcribe solos from recordings. All instruments are welcome, and students should write to the instructor prior to the first class to let them know their instrument.

The history of the American musical in the 20th century is paradoxical. While the genre is often denigrated as staging lyrical utopias of romance and adventure allowing audiences to escape depressing quotidian realities, many musicals did seek to engage some of the most pressing social issues of their day. In this course, we will look—and listen—closely to four differing musicals from the 20th century, studying their creative origins, while also analyzing their complex social meanings revealed through the story, music, lyrics, staging, and dance.

This course is an advanced, project-oriented writing workshop with an emphasis on dramatic structure, storytelling through music, and the exploration of character as practical matters. Each student will propose a new, full-length musical and will work towards the creation of a first draft over the course of the quarter. In addition to presenting and workshopping new scene or song material weekly, students will study, discuss, and draw inspiration from standout examples of the genre. Students will present excerpted readings from their musicals at the end of the course. Some experience in writing for musical theater is expected.

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

This course explores how geography shapes culture and how culture shapes geography within the context of traditional and popular musical practices from around the world. Starting from the premise that social processes, cultural practices, and different scales of geographic space are mutually interdependent, two foundational questions arise. First, how do diverse geographical knowledges mediate the interpretation and practice of different musical genres? Second, how does musical performance in the context of the political economy of music and musicians’ artistic agendas promote particular and competing spatial imaginaries? Students will interrogate terms from human geography such as space, place, local, global, and scale; assess debates surrounding these terms; and critically evaluate the power of maps to shape geographic knowledge. Through assembling this critical geographic lens, students will analyze the ways in which musical practices across different cultures converge with social processes and discourses including race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, diasporas, and technology and how a spatial imagination shapes this nexus.

Writing about music is always an act of translation: trying to set the indescribable—sound, beyond words—into a worded space. This class will explore different tactics taken by writers across form and genre and look at how they attempt to solve the problem; we’ll also practice writing about music within different conventional forms (reference article, review) in order to test out their strengths and weaknesses ourselves. We will look to the expanded approaches to music writing offered by the internet as well as older genres, as defined in the four nodes of the course: personal, contextual/analytical, fictional, and multimodal, with the idea of communication about and with music at the center of all the writing we do. As primarily a writing class, we will build a toolbox of techniques, looking to both academic and popular forms, and will focus on developing article and essay pitches for journalism and web outlets as well as gaining a broader knowledge of the different kinds of music writing there are and ways to use them separately and in combination.

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.