Courses

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This course is a selected survey of classical, popular, and folk music traditions from around the world. The goals are not only to expand our skills as listeners but also to redefine what we consider music to be and, in the process, stimulate a fresh approach to our own diverse musical traditions. In addition, the role of music as ritual, aesthetic experience, mode of communication, and artistic expression is explored.

This introductory course in music is intended for students who are interested in exploring the language, interpretation, and meaning of music through coordinated listening, analysis, and creative work. By listening to and comprehending the structural and aesthetic considerations behind significant written and improvised works, from the earliest examples of notated Western music to the music of living composers and performers, students will be prepared to undertake analytical and ultimately creative projects. The relationship between cultural and historical practices and the creation and reception of music will also be considered. The course is taught by a practicing composer, whose experience will guide and inform the works studied. No prior background in music is required.

This introductory course in music is intended for students who are interested in exploring the language, interpretation, and meaning of music through coordinated listening, analysis, and creative work. By listening to and comprehending the structural and aesthetic considerations behind significant written and improvised works, from the earliest examples of notated Western music to the music of living composers and performers, students will be prepared to undertake analytical and ultimately creative projects. The relationship between cultural and historical practices and the creation and reception of music will also be considered. The course is taught by a practicing composer, whose experience will guide and inform the works studied. No prior background in music is 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.

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 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.

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 explores research on music in the mind and brain sciences as it has developed over the past four decades. During this time, we have come to an increasingly refined understanding of the ways the brain processes sound. It remains the case, however, that not all sound is music, and in this course we will investigate how musical sound is organized to make it musical, and how this organization reflects the capacities of the human mind.Among the topics the class will engage are the origins and functions of music, absolute pitch, music and memory, how music shapes emotional responses, movement and music, connections between music and images, and the relationship between music and language.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

Over the course of the last 120 years, opera and cinema have been sounded and seen together again and again. Where opera is commonly associated with extravagant performance and production, cinema is popularly associated with realism. Yet their encounter not only proves these assumptions wrong but produces some extraordinary third kinds--media hybrids. It also produces some extraordinary love affairs. Thomas Edison wanted a film of his to be “a grand opera,” and Federico Fellini and Woody Allen wanted opera to saturate their films. Thinking about these mutual attractions, “Opera across Media” explores different operatic and cinematic repertories as well as other media forms. Among films to be studied are Pabst’s Threepenny Opera (1931), Visconti’s Senso (1954), Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Zeffirelli’s La traviata (1981), DeMille’s Carmen (1915), Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), Bergman’s The Magic Flute (1975), and Fellini’s E la nave va (1983). No prior background in music performance, theory, or notation is needed. Students may write papers based on their own skills and interests relevant to the course. Required work includes attendance at all screenings and classes; weekly postings on Canvas about readings and viewings; attendances at a Met HD broadcast and a Lyric Opera live opera; a short “think piece” midway through the course; and a final term paper of 8-10 pages.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Songs are getting shorter. Hyperpop has reached the mainstream. And Taylor Swift has released thirty-four different versions of her latest album. What do these things all have in common? This course will propose that the answer is music streaming, which over the last two decades has radically reshaped the way artists write, record, and release music. We will explore streaming’s impact on the popular music soundscape by reading recent scholarship on the economics and politics of streaming, digging into the curation practices of platforms like Spotify, and listening closely to streaming-era genres like hyperpop and Soundcloud rap. Along the way, we will consider big questions about musical creativity and standardization, democratization and homogenization, and privacy and surveillance. Students need not read music notation or know music theory; they should come prepared to read challenging theoretical texts and listen attentively to a lot of music. Assessments will include essays, research projects, and self-produced podcast episodes.

This course is geared toward students who would like to improve their music literacy skills and strengthen their overall musicianship through intensive sight-singing practice. In this supportive environment, we will explore not only a wide range of musical concepts (including rhythm, meter, musical symbols, note-names, solfege, scales, intervals, and harmony), but we’ll also learn to recognize common pitfalls, tackle anxiety surrounding sight-reading, and learn to trust our instincts so that we may keep pushing forward after faltering. This course will sharpen students’ aural skills as we work on listening and notating what we hear. We will go beyond the confines of Western Classical traditions to explore other systems of musical notation, and learn how singing music from oral traditions can help us to become stronger musicians.

Note: This course is recommended for students who have had at least some experience singing or playing an instrument, but who wish to strengthen their skills and confidence. Students should be able to match pitch.

This course introduces fundamental tools for the analysis of tonal music, with a focus on European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our goal is to develop familiarity with the concepts and methods of linear analysis, Formenlehre, rhythm and meter, and semiotics. We will explore tensions and synergies between these approaches and reflect on the type of knowledge that they offer. Note: Music 31100 is conceived as a preparation and foundation for Music 31200, which will build directly upon the analytic models introduced in Music 31100.

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.

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.

This proseminar will engage contemporary musicology’s revivification of the elusive concept “modernity,” engaging some grounding theories of the modern alongside new and imaginative work in music and sound studies, much of it reframing what modernity was and, through narrative and archival revision, might still be. Familiarity with western music history, musical repertoire, and music notation may in some cases help but is not a prerequisite.

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.

In this proseminar we shall look at specific moments when the musics of Israel/Palestine converged, responding to and shaping historical change and conflict. Weekly sessions will take specific moments as ways of exploring how music was critical to the processes of change, identity, and accommodation. We begin with moments in Antiquity, among them the moments in which the temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (e.g., 70 ce). and the Miʿrāj, when the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven (ca. 621 ce). Moments marking the patterns of settlement (Yishuv) and political transformation and unrest will mark the chronology of modernity and modernism (e.g., 1917, 1933, 1938). The moments of Israeli statehood and Palestinian Nakba will be of growing significance as the course moves toward the twenty-first century (e.g., 1948, 1967, and 1987).

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 course has two goals: (1) to introduce graduate students to the broad theoretical underpinnings of ethnomusicology as a research discipline and (2) to help students gain facility with the resources and perspectives that might enable them to teach a quarter- or semester-long undergraduate course on the musics of the world. As such, the readings and assignments focus on canonic materials and areas for ethnomusicological study including, but not limited to, major monographs, recorded collections and reference works examining the musics of East, Southeast and South Asia; Africa; Europe; and the Americas. Each student will be responsible for presenting brief overviews of key texts and recordings as well as devising two syllabi and a sample lecture outline by the end of the quarter.

The course explores some of the music traditions that hail from South Asia—a region defined by the countries of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Maldives, and their diasporas. The course will study music and some of its inextricably linked forms of dance and theatre through the lens of ethnomusicology, where music is considered in its social and cultural contexts. Students will develop tools to listen, analyze, watch, and participate in South Asian forms of music-making, using case-study based inquiries as guides along the way.

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. 

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. 

This seminar will explore contemporary debates on how music has been thought to define, divide, precede, and exceed, the category of the human. In an epoch theorized at once as a universalizing “Anthropocene,” and at other times as the socially stratifying “Capitalocene”; and in an intellectual moment in which notions of uniquely human creative capacities are questioned both by a growing literature in animal studies, and by an insistence that large language models are capable of equivalent (or analogous) creative production, must we—“humanists” in the academy—reassess our relationship to our object of study? This seminar approaches these issues through readings of classic texts and recent scholarly interventions that consider, at base level, the relationship between music and the category of the human. We will read widely from critical studies of music and evolution, from feminist theories of (sound) reproduction, from scholarship on music and racial ideology, and from post-humanist writing from animal sounds to AI, among others, to consider the place, and the future, of the “human” in the humanities.

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 presents an open environment for creativity and expression through composition in the electronic music studio. The course provides students with a background in the fundamentals of sound and acoustics, covers the theory and practice of digital signal processing for audio, and introduces the recording studio as a powerful compositional tool. The course culminates in a concert of original student works presented in multi-channel surround sound. Enrollment gives students access to the Electronic Music Studio in the Department of Music. No prior knowledge of electronic music is necessary.

The class studies and practices advanced concepts of orchestration. It will analyze concepts and techniques that go beyond traditional “scoring” for the orchestra. Subjects include “shaping sound”, instrumental synthesis, techniques of temporal organization beyond a common meter, spatialization, and others. While the focus of the class will be on analysis and discussion of seminal works, small studies and exercises will be complement the theory. For their final project the students will write a short ensemble piece that will be rehearsed and performed.

This two-quarter course will provide a conceptual and practical introduction to the art, the craft, and the practice of orchestral conducting. The course is targeted primarily toward graduate students in Music Composition, but is open to advanced undergraduate or graduate students with orchestral or choral performance experience as well. Interested students should have had some experience playing or singing in a performance ensemble, as well as a basic familiarity with orchestral instruments and with the standard orchestral repertoire.

During the winter quarter, class sessions, readings, and repertoire assignments will provide the practical and philosophical basis for subsequent work in the course. Important technical exercises will be assigned every week, as well as several short papers and worksheets over the course of the quarter. The overall workload of the course is commensurate with a one-half course load per quarter. Because of the workshop nature of the course, class attendance and class participation are of prime importance. Students will receive one course credit upon successful completion of the two-quarter sequence (Winter and Spring 2026).

The class will survey and discuss recent aesthetic positions and examine their influence on 20th century music and on current compositional activities. Besides some of the classics of modern aesthetic theory (Adorno/Horckheimer, Derrida, Butler, Deleuze, Zaid) some more recent essays will be read and we will elaborate on contexts, connections, and contradictions of the texts. An important part of the course will be discussions about the relevance of the aesthetic positions surveyed for contemporary music and for our own positions as artists in today’s political situation.

The Colloquium is a series of lectures followed by discussion and normally given by speakers from other institutions who are specially invited by the Music Department to share their recent research or compositions with students and faculty. All lectures take place on Friday afternoons.

The Colloquium is a series of lectures followed by discussion and normally given by speakers from other institutions who are specially invited by the Music Department to share their recent research or compositions with students and faculty. All lectures take place on Friday afternoons.

During the five three-hour sessions of the Dissertation Chapter Seminar each quarter, Ph.D. students in their fourth and fifth years will have the opportunity to share strategies for writing up their dissertations during the years of most intensive research. We shall work collectively to develop these strategies, investigating the on-the-ground research work that students bring to the DCS from the early stages of research to the completion of chapters in preparation for the dissertation-completion year. Each session will begin with a discussion of research-to-writing strategies, and it will conclude with discussion in the seminar of one or two pre-circulated chapters by students in the DCS. Ph.D. students who are not in residence during their fourth and fifth years, because they are conducting research or no longer in residence in Chicago, will participate remotely. The DCS provides students an opportunity for a sustained and supportive dissertation-writing workshop for Ph.D. students in Music.

During the five three-hour sessions of the Dissertation Chapter Seminar each quarter, Ph.D. students in their fourth and fifth years will have the opportunity to share strategies for writing up their dissertations during the years of most intensive research. We shall work collectively to develop these strategies, investigating the on-the-ground research work that students bring to the DCS from the early stages of research to the completion of chapters in preparation for the dissertation-completion year. Each session will begin with a discussion of research-to-writing strategies, and it will conclude with discussion in the seminar of one or two pre-circulated chapters by students in the DCS. Ph.D. students who are not in residence during their fourth and fifth years, because they are conducting research or no longer in residence in Chicago, will participate remotely. The DCS provides students an opportunity for a sustained and supportive dissertation-writing workshop for Ph.D. students in Music.