Theory

MUSI 31200 is the second of a two-quarter sequence developing your skills to practically and critically engage with analysis in a variety of tonal musics. We will focus on chromatic harmony, modulation, and neo-Riemannian terminology; on metric theory; and on issues of corpus, form, and harmony in popular music studies. Our analytical work will be framed within an ongoing disciplinary conversation about what tonal analysis has been and can be in the field of music theory and beyond.

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.

Alluring dance, virtuosic guitar playing, and deep song. This course provides and introduction to the history and theory of flamenco—developed by the oft-marginalized gitano people (Spanish Roma) and recognized as World Heritage Treasure by UNESCO. Students will learn to describe musical and choreographic techniques and to distinguish between the different subgenres that constitute flamenco. Through a study of the music and complementary readings, we will learn about gitano culture and explore issues of identity, representation, class, gender, and ethnicity.

This course focuses on the tonal language of nineteenth-century European composers, including Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, and Wagner. Students confront analytical problems posed by these composers' increasing uses of chromaticism and extended forms through both traditional (classical) models of tonal harmony and form, as well as alternative approaches specifically tailored to this repertory. Students present model compositions and write analytical papers.

The second quarter 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 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.

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.

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.

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.