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 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 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 investigating 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, postcolonialism, nationalism, migration, and indigeneity 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 soca, 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.”

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.

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.

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.