Theory

This course focuses on the compositional norms of the "galant" and "high classical" styles of the eighteenth century, especially the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. We will approach this repertoire from different angles, engaging literature on Formenlehre, schema theory, rhythm and meter, and topic theory. Ultimately, we will explore how conventions and deviations thereof participate in the construction of musical meaning and expression.

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.

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.

The subject of improvisation is one that has attained renewed interest and urgency across a spectrum of musical disciplines in recent years: history, theory, ethnomusicology, and composition. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that our understanding of the development and practice of just about every musical tradition has been touched by this Renaissance of scholarship. In this seminar, we will overview some of this scholarship as it impacts some 2,000 years of musical practices and theories. The idea will not be to offer a comprehensive history of improvisation, but rather to dip into selected moments and repertoires in order to see what commonalities we might find. We will see how improvisatory practices were central to a range of canonical repertoires in Western music: from Medieval organum and discant singing to 18th c. instrumental diminutions and partimento pedagogies for the keyboard, Renaissance counterpoint singing, to 19th c. virtuosic piano fantasies and vocal embellishments. We will also consider more contemporary improvisatory practices in jazz and contemporary music, touching on some non-western traditions of improvisation (particularly from the Middle East and South Asia). We will consider varied theoretical problems of aesthetics, the musical canon, and cognitive/psychological aspects of extemporaneous performance. Each class will be divided into both a theoretical/historical part followed by a practicum. Class to include guest faculty performers.

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.

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.

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.

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 is a continuation of Music 31100, a study of advanced techniques in tonal analysis. Much of our work will center on Schenkerian theory, but we will also place Schenkerian approaches in dialogue with other methods, including recent approaches to Formenlebre, schema theory, and neo-Riemannian theory. We will be interested in exploring the intersections (and frictions) between these diverse analytical methods, seeking at once to develop analytical fluency in each of them and to heighten our sensitivity to the methodological issues involved in a pluralist approach to tonal analysis.