Courses

For questions about undergraduate courses, please contact the Director of Undergraduate Studies, Travis Jackson.

MUSI 10100 Intro to Western Music

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
History

MUSI 10100 Intro to Western Music

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
History

MUSI 10200 Intro to World Music

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 10200 Intro to World Music

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 10200 Intro to World Music

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 10300 Intro to Music: Materials and Design

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 10400 Intro to Music: Analysis and Criticism

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Theory

MUSI 10400 Intro to Music: Analysis and Criticism

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Theory

MUSI 15100 Harmony and Voice Leading I

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Theory

MUSI 23300 Introduction to the Social and Cultural Study of Music

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 24100 Composition Seminar

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 25422 Hearing Popular Music

(MAAD 12422)

For decades, popular music has been the soundtrack to many Americans’ lives. This class explores the structure, function, and impact of a range of vernacular musics from the 20th and 21st centuries. Our approach to popular music will be by turns historical, analytical, and sociological. Students will learn about formal designs of pop songs, from verse-chorus to much more elaborate structures, along with antecedents in the Great American Songbook tradition. Students will learn to analyze the harmonic and melodic conventions in various genres, and also spend significant time with groove analysis and design. Finally, the class will interrogate the sociological relevance of vernacular musics, weaving in discussions of relevant social issues from radio play to popularity, and from subcultural appeal to racial identity. This class is open to anyone who listens carefully and with passion, and who wants to grow their ability to write about music. Experience as a practitioner of any type of music and/or a passing knowledge of music theory will be helpful, but it is not necessary to read notated music for this course.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Theory

MUSI 26100 Intro to Composition

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 26618 Electronic Music I: Computer Music

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 27423 Divas, Idols, Material Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Music Videos

(MAAD 14723, GNSE 20135)

The stark black and white of Madonna’s “Vogue” and the pinks and sparkles of “Material Girl.” The explosive surprise releases of Beyoncé's BEYONCÉ and Lemonade visual albums. The lavish cinematic spectacle of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” and the fanbait intertextuality of SM Entertainment’s Aespa. Since MTV’s advent in 1981, hit music videos have made a number of pop songs inextricable from iconic imagery and choreography; ubiquitous digital devices and the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok have only increased pop music’s audiovisuality.

Looking at and listening to female pop icons raises fraught questions of agency, representation, race, sexuality/sexualization, bodies, commodification, and capital. In this course, students will gain a vocabulary for talking about both the audio and visual parameters of music video, and they will use this vocabulary to engage with critical frameworks for examining meaning, circulation, and reception in contemporary music videos.

Assignments across the course will allow students to experiment with a range of writing and media genres, including critical close readings, micro-reception histories, thinkpieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
History

MUSI 33000 Proseminar in Ethnomusicology

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 23100/33100 Jazz

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 23517/335176 Music of the Caribbean

(LACS 23517/LACS 33517)

This course covers the sonic and structural characteristics, as well as the social, political, environmental, and historical contexts of Caribbean popular and folk music. These initial inquiries will give way to the investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that are particularly important to an understanding of the Caribbean and its people. Specifically, we will think through the ways in which creolization, hybridity, colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism, and migration inform and shape music performance and consumption in the region and throughout its diaspora. In this course, participants will listen to many different styles and repertoires of music, ranging from calypso to kumina, from reggaeton to bachata, and from dancehall to zouk. We will also examine how the Caribbean and its music are imagined and engaged with globally by focusing attention on how and why music from that region has traveled and been adopted and adapted by numerous ethnic and religious “others.”

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology

MUSI 24000/34000 Composition Lessons

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

MUSI 26100 and MUSI 26200 (26200 can be taken concurrently with 24000)
MUSI 15100, 15200 and 15300
Consent of instructor

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 24000/34000 Composition Lessons

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

MUSI 26100 and MUSI 26200 (26200 can be taken concurrently with 24000)
MUSI 15100, 15200 and 15300
Consent of instructor

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 24000/34000 Composition Lessons

This course consists of individual weekly composition lessons.

MUSI 26100 and MUSI 26200 (26200 can be taken concurrently with 24000)
MUSI 15100, 15200 and 15300
Consent of instructor

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 34100 Composition Seminar

The composition seminar is a weekly session designed for graduate students in composition. 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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Composition

MUSI 41000 Graduate Colloquium: Music

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.

Staff
2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology/Composition/History/Theory

MUSI 41520 Dissertation Chapter Seminar

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.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology/Composition/History/Theory

MUSI 41521 Graduate Teaching Forum in Music

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Ethnomusicology/Composition/History/Theory