Undergraduate

This one-quarter course is designed to enrich the listening experience of students, particularly with respect to the art music of the Western European and American concert tradition. Students are introduced to the basic elements of music and the ways that they are integrated to create works in various styles. Particular emphasis is placed on musical form and on the potential for music to refer to and interact with aspects of the world outside.

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 canonical musicals from the past 100 years, studying their creative origins, while also analyzing their complex social meanings revealed through the story, music, lyrics, staging, and dance.

This proseminar analyzes rock music's complex, evolving legacy in global culture and the study of popular music and genre. For better or worse, we still think and hear popular music through rock. Tangled up in the political upheavals of and around 1968, rock music continues to shape how musicians and scholars imagine political agency and how music might make a difference. Later musicians have sought to recapture rock's alleged disruptive potential in ever-new paradigms: prog rock, punk, metal, and many more. Scholars, too, looked to rock music when they began to study subcultures and supposedly counter-hegemonic cultural production. As the semi-mythical archetype of "popular music that doesn't care about being popular," rock helped establish the study of recorded popular music and genre. We will scrutinize rock music’s ambivalent legacy in forming new musical, political, and scholarly discourses with readings, research projects, presentations, and discussions. Since we will try to understand the whole of popular music through rock, this course will benefit greatly from participants with diverse musical backgrounds and skill sets. 

Hand-built circuits, tape loops, feedback, filters, ring modulators, turntables, live-processing software environments, microphones, and human-machine interface designs. In this course, we will study current and historical approaches to the performative use of hardware and software environments in music, and will follow the practice as it continues to redefine music composition and improvisation in the 21st century. Study will be repertoire-based, drawing from the work of artists ranging from David Tudor to Herbie Hancock to Grandmaster Flash to Kaija Saariaho. 

This course provides a historical, theoretical, and practical introduction to aesthetic technologies of sound. Open to students in Music, DOVA, TAPS, and MAAD, this course is geared toward a broad spectrum of creators including material musicians, mixed-media artists, dramaturges, game designers, etc. who use sound in their artistic practice. The course will include a historical overview of the porous relationship between sound and music from the birth of electricity, futurism, and Dada to recent conceptions and innovations of the sonic arts in computer music, intermedia, installations, gaming, and performance art. 

How do listeners perceive musical meter? How do composers manipulate rhythm for expressive purposes? How do performers modify notated rhythms? Why does music make us move? These questions have motivated an extensive body of recent research in music theory and cognition, after a long-standing focus on the domain of pitch. Students will engage with this literature through reading and music analysis, to learn about rhythmic and metrical structures in music—from baroque dance to hip-hop. 

The Maqam Chamber Course gives instrumentalists and vocalists the opportunity to explore maqam repertoire, theory, improvisation, and performance practices through a hands-on approach. Students in this course study maqam, the microtonal modal and phrasing system used in throughout North Africa, Southwest Asia, and Transcaucasia. Students meet on a weekly basis to learn and practice repertoire from these regions, with a focus on interpretation, ornamentation, extended techniques and improvisation skills. Through group rehearsals and exercises, students acquire skills necessary to contribute within a small ensemble setting.

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. 

Each May since 1956 popular musicians and fans from Europe gather in a European metropolis to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), a competitive spectacle in which musicians from one nation compete against one another. Organized, funded, and broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union, the largest conglomerate of national radio and television networks in the world, the ESC is extensively participatory, creating its own communities of fans, musicians, musical producers, and ordinary citizens, who join together at all levels of society to interact with the politics and historical narratives of Europe. From the moment of heightened Cold War conflict at the birth of ESC to the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the present, ESC has generated public discourse that not only reflects European and global politics, but provides a conduit for local and national citizenries to respond and shape such public discourse about gender and sexuality. The weekly work for the course draws students from across the College into the counterpoint of history and politics with aesthetics and popular culture. Each week will be divided into two parts, the first dedicated to reading and discussion of texts about European history and politics from World War II to the present, the second to interaction with music. Students will experience the ESC through close readings of individual songs and growing familiarity with individual nations with a participatory final project.