2019-2020

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.

Musical Robotics is a skills and discussion-based class for students interested in learning analog and digital electronics to build robotic musical instruments or sound art installations. Discussions will be organized around readings related to art and technology with a special focus on sound-based works. Students will learn to program Arduinos to control DC motors, solenoids, and servos with music applications like Logic Pro and Max/MSP. As a final project students will present a new instrument they've created or plans for an art installation featuring a kinetic sculpture element.

This seminar will review recent work in affect theory and its application to musical practice. It will also explore how theoretical perspectives on relationships between music and the emotions, beginning in the eighteenth century and extending through to the twenty-first, suggest reformulations both to affect theory and to the way it might be applied to music. Seminar discussions will be focused on readings from affect theory, the history of music theory, music psychology, and cognitive psychology, and detailed consideration of musical works from a range of musical traditions.

Student and faculty composers meet weekly for composition seminars to discuss issues related to musical materials, imagination, design, aesthetics, and compositional techniques with leaders in the field from across the globe.

This course's goal is to introduce graduate students to the history, development and theoretical underpinnings of ethnomusicology as a research discipline. In our readings, therefore, we will focus our attention on key figures and institutions, especially from the late 19th century forward; on major issues and debates in and beyond ethnomusicology; on the relationships between ethnomusicology and other research disciplines; and on emergent emphases and concerns in ethnomusicological work.

A seminar in twentieth- and twenty-first-century western music is a terribly hoary "topic", if such a tame word can really access the taxonomic catastrophe of "what happened in/with/to western music after 1900". This is somewhat alleviated by the "pro" in proseminar: as with the other proseminars, ours is not principally a survey, but rather an engagement "with salient scholarly issues on trends and repertories" of its chosen time-period. Put another way: we'll be focusing more on how people within the last long decade think and write about music that emerged since 1900, and less on "what actually happened”* (the "content", history, or music-theoretical aspects of various repertories, styles, movements, figures). In the process, we’ll proceed conceptually and thematically rather than chronologically or via various “traditions”; in addition, we’ll explore three mutually irreducible but often interacting fields of musical production: 1) classical or “composerly” musics, 2) popular musics, and 3) jazz and improvisational idioms. We’ll maintain a dual-focus on how these fields listen to themselves (traditions, legacies, evolutions and revolutions) but also to each other (fusions, hybrids, crossovers) and to their other (in many cases non-Western) others.

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).