MUSI

Improvisation: when we hear this term, we think of real-time performance. We think of skill, inspiration, passion. With a little more reflection, we think of the hours of preparation that lie behind every action of the improviser, the licks, tropes, and patterns. If improvisation is determined by a larger aesthetic system, how is it any different from other species of performative actions? Is improvisation only improvisation by virtue of not (yet) being on paper? The term can become so broad that it becomes unwieldy. We can name very few intrinsic characteristics of improvisation, but we know it when we see it - in other words, it is controlled by the vast network of social and cultural signs present in its performance context.
Improvisation is a Western term that has been associated in the 20th century with Black musical forms. Because of this, the term improvisation undergoes a process of racialization - representing the body as opposed to the mind, the irrational as opposed to the supposed rationality of composition. We can now easily see the presence of improvisation in other performance cultures, including European art-music. Keeping this in mind, all attempts to theorize the improvisatory should nevertheless be sensitive to its history. Can musical improvisation give us a model for newer, more egalitarian social structures? Or does the very word improvisation represent a modernist myopia, a failure to see the organizational structures that ungird musical activity?

This is a yearlong course in ear training, keyboard progressions, realization of figured basses at the keyboard, and reading of chamber and orchestral scores. Classes each week consist of one dictation lab (sixty minutes long) and one keyboard lab (thirty minutes long).

In 16th century counterpoint students will write traditional species counterpoint as studied by composers for centuries, but with an ear bent towards the actual style of Palestrina and other Renaissance masters. In addition to critiquing their own exercises, students will analyze Renaissance counterpoint through listening, score-study, and fill-in-the-voice puzzles. Not only will students be able to recognize and discuss the effects of traditional counterpoint on composers from Victoria to Stravinsky, they will also discuss the elusive question of what makes good counterpoint… good, regardless of style. 

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.

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.

The second quarter of this three quarter sequence explores extensions of harmonic syntax, the basics of classical form, further work with counterpoint, and nondiatonic seventh chords. Musicianship labs in ear training and keyboard skills required.

The second quarter of this three quarter sequence explores extensions of harmonic syntax, the basics of classical form, further work with counterpoint, and nondiatonic seventh chords. Musicianship labs in ear training and keyboard skills required.

This course, part of the Social Sciences Civ core, looks at musics in different moments of Euro-American history and the social contexts in which they originated, with some comparative views on other world traditions. It aims to give students a better understanding of the social contexts of European music over this period; aids for the basic sound structures of pieces from these different moments; and convincing writing in response to prompts based on source readings or music pieces. Our second quarter (MUS 12200 etc.) runs from the beginning of European Romanticism around 1800 to the turn of the 21st century.

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.