MUSI

The composition seminar is a weekly session designed for graduate students in composition. 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.

This course is a selective introduction to anthropology and related, influential strands of high/critical theory, on one hand, and the changing relation of both to the study of music and the field of ethnomusicology, on the other. After an opening situating the course's origin and content in university and broader intellectual currents, we will proceed through a series of modules focused on particular issues and approaches: culture; society; research paradigms and theory; ethnography; intellectual crises and questions; the emergent field known as sound studies; and, finally, anthropological studies of art and music. Rather than providing a comprehensive survey, then, this course presents students with a series of paths they might fruitfully explore further, a set of tools for navigating the heterogeneous, distributed nature of fields with ever-proliferating sub-fields and research/writing paradigms.

This course examines issues and contexts for European music in the period, concentrating on cultural meaning, transmission, improvisation, and sources. Students will do work with digital editions of Renaissance music, interactions between Europe and the Americas, and problems of gender and music.

MUSI 27200 addresses topics in music from 1600 to 1800, including opera, sacred music, the emergence of instrumental genres, the codification of tonality, and the Viennese classicism of Haydn and Mozart.

Electronic Music I presents an open environment for creativity and expression through composition in the electronic music studio. The course provides students with a background in the fundamentals of sound and acoustics, covers the theory and practice of digital signal processing for audio, and introduces the recording studio as a powerful compositional tool. The course culminates in a concert of original student works presented in multi-channel surround sound. Enrollment gives students access to the Electronic Music Studio in the Department of Music. No prior knowledge of electronic music is necessary.

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.

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.

Historically one of the most complex and contested regions in the world, Israel/Palestine has a music culture that bears witness to processes of connection and separation. The politics of music in Israel/Palestine grow from conflicted beliefs about authenticity and ownership, the sounds of difference and sameness. The sacred and the secular intersect, and boundaries of practice and genre both divide and unite. Local practices have never been independent of global movement, be it in diaspora, pilgrimage, or the distant residence of refugees. The musical landscape of the region, therefore, has shifted throughout history, accessible primarily through the archaeology of music scholarship. In this proseminar we shall look at specific moments when the musics of Israel/Palestine converged, responding to and shaping historical change and conflict. We shall explore musical repertories and practices of all kinds, whether sacred or secular, vernacular or élite.

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.