Undergraduate

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.

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.

Songs are vehicles of expression that simultaneously employ two modes of communication: language and music. This course will focus on songs in which the linguistic component comes from poems to which music has been added. This practice goes back to antiquity, but it flourished in a remarkable and influential way in German-speaking countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We will explore analytical techniques that consider how words and music combine (and occasionally compete) in songs by composers like Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, moving later in the course to composers like Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Claude Debussy. We will also explore instrumental arrangements of songs done by Franz Liszt and others to consider how music can evoke the spirit of a song in the absence of its words.

Writing about music is bringing together seemingly disparate worlds of experience— word and sound— worlds that are inherently incompatible as the quote suggests. How do we write about musical genres, emotions and memories generated by sound, people and technology that make, curate, and circulate music? This course will introduce students to writing and research methods in musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies. We will collectively engage existing tools and develop new ones to write about music and sound creatively, analytically, and multimodally. Focusing on various forms and genres of music writing including but not limited to (e)-journalism, fan reviews, scholarly writing, writings by musicians, new media and AI writing, musician (auto)biographies, album covers, and liner notes, we will experiment with various registers and styles of describing music and develop a toolkit for rendering various aspects of music and sound in words. Critical, artistic, fictional, and various creative mediations on music will be surveyed with a focus on how writings about music become artistic works in and of themselves.

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.

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. 

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. 

This course examines Caribbean popular music through its sonic features, performance practices, and cultural meanings. Students will explore a range of genres — including calypso, soca, dancehall, reggaeton, zouk, and bachata — and consider how these styles reflect and shape Caribbean identities and histories. Participants investigate how music engages with key concepts such as creolization, hybridity, colonialism, nationalism, and migration, with a focus on both local traditions and global diasporic expressions. Special attention will be given to Carnival and fête culture as dynamic spaces of performance, resistance, and cultural celebration. The course also examines how Caribbean music travels and transforms beyond the region, influencing artists and audiences worldwide.

No musical background required. Open to undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines.

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.