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’s goal is to introduce graduate students to the history, development and theoretical underpinnings of ethnomusicology as a research discipline. In our readings, therefore, we will focus our attention on key figures and institutions, especially from the late 19th century forward; on major issues and debates in and beyond ethnomusicology; on the relationships between ethnomusicology and other research disciplines; and on emergent emphases and concerns in ethnomusicological work.

The seminar will introduce students to issues and trends in the study of music since 1900. We will explore how scholars have in the last several years have studied musical practices of the 20th and 21st centuries as well as how they have determined salient repertoires, concepts, and themes for their research. Genres explored include German modernism, gospel, EDM, South African Kwaito, noise, and Tejano/Latinx pop (among others). Concepts encountered include migration-diaspora, sound recording, community formation, experimentation, nationhood, diva worship, improvisation, and mourning. We will also reflect on the ways in which scholars have blurred boundaries between musicological subfields and variously combined historiography, ethnography, performance studies, and music analysis.

This course has traditionally focused on analyzing 20th-century art music from the European tradition (Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, etc.) using the tools of pitch-class set (pcset) theory. For this iteration of the class, we will focus instead on the music of what Fred Moten calls the “Black radical tradition,” centering works and performances by female composers including Nicolle Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Alice Coltrane, Amina Claudine Meyers, and Renee Baker. We will also spend time with music by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and artists associated with the AACM. Though this music is regularly categorized as “jazz” or “free jazz,” we will follow George Lewis in querying such labels, which often serve to segregate Black experimentalism from elite white traditions. In order to cultivate an alertness to the ethical stakes of studying Black music in the class, we will openly discuss problems of appropriation and intellectual colonization, making these an explicit part of the class’s subject matter. Seminal texts from Moten, Lewis, Okiji, and Baraka will serve as conceptual frames for our analytical and critical work. As part of that work, we will still learn and deploy certain concepts from pcset theory, as warranted by the music at hand. But we will also develop analytical methods that are responsive to the sounding particularities of a given work or performance, focusing especially on timbre, texture, time/rhythm/meter/groove, group interaction, and the relationship between composed and improvised sections. Analytical work will range from “unscripted,” informal prose to more formal, technical work, some of which will involve transcription. Throughout, we will bring our analytical findings into dialogue with broader interpretive and historical questions, drawing and building on the critical insights of Moten et al.

As part of three sequential courses, this survey of music history examines European musical culture, and those with which it had contact, from around 800 to 1750. Students will engage scores, source readings, and analysis.

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 class will explore different contemporary theoretical approaches to the analysis of popular music from 1960 to the present, in genres such as pop, rock, rap, folk, and country. Topics examined will include vocal and instrumental timbre, verse-chorus form, the presence or absence of functional harmony, flow and groove, metric ambiguity, and the ontology of song. Students will learn to use aural, embodied, spectrographic, and transcription-based methods to analyze individual songs.

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.

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.

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.