Courses
This course introduces written and aural music fundamentals including notation, scales, intervals, chords, rhythm, meter and sight-singing. Students will compose melodies and short pieces and complete listening projects. Course does not count towards the completion of the minor.
Area: Humanities
Music defines the Star Trek experience. Through their continued reuse and repetition, Star Trek’s many musical themes go beyond their original audiovisual frameworks to operate as learned musical-cultural texts. As Star Trek has expanded its content into a myriad of installments and media platforms, this musical symbolism has proved vital in articulating both these differences and “sameness.”This online, asynchronous course uses Star Trek’s music as a tool to investigate musical branding and the creation of meaning in the media we consume every day. Through close viewings—and listenings—of film, television episodes, video games, computer games, commercials, and other media, we will explore the meaning(s) these media construct and acquire as they are re-used and re-purposed in audiovisual contexts. Your work will include studying media clips, television episodes, and some feature-length films; short readings in which we interact with both current and classic scholarly literature; regular discussion posts and responses to our content; a weekly reflection journal of short posts; and a final paper/project on a Star Trek music topic of your choice (1500 words). In so doing, we will hone your analytical skills by learning to critically evaluate filmic media and craft arguments about the roles of music/sound in film.
Area: Humanities
This course uses composition and song-writing projects to introduce music fundamentals to students with little or no musical background. Topics will include rhythm and meter, pitch and intervals, scales, chords, and harmony, and how to read and write music in both traditional and popular presentations. We will cover standard classical music notation (score, Roman numerals, traditional theory terminology) as well as popular (lead-sheet notation and performance conventions). This course has no prerequisite.
Area: Humanities
Introduction to basic principles of tonal music through listening, analysis and music making. Students study melody, harmony, voice leading, figured bass and dissonance treatment, and will also undertake short composition projects. Must have taken the qualifying examination or AS.376.111. Recommended to be taken concurrently with AS.376.221.
Area: Humanities
This course continues the aural and written work of the previous course, but focuses on chromatic harmony while continuing the study of melody, counterpoint, and figured bass. Prerequisite: Music Theory I.
Prerequisite(s): AS.376.211
Area: Humanities
An introduction to basic musicianship skills. The course is divided into performance skills (sight singing, rhythm reading, basic piano, and improvisation) and aural skills (recognition of pitch, chords, rhythms, melodies, and other musical structures). Topics include major and minor keys and simple time signatures. Emphasis is placed on developing effective practice techniques. Pre-requisite: AS.376.111 (Rudiments of Music Theory and Musicianship) or placement exam.
Area: Humanities
A continuation of the skills developed Musicianship I. The course is divided into performance skills (sight singing, rhythm reading, basic piano, and improvisation) and aural skills (recognition of pitch, chords, rhythms, melodies, and other musical structures). Topics include minor keys, chromatic melody and harmony, compound time signatures, and syncopation). As in Musicianship I, emphasis is placed on developing effective practice techniques. Pre-requisite: AS.376.221 (Musicianship I) or placement exam.
Area: Humanities
This course offers an introduction to music of the Western “classical” tradition through the study of a select number of works written over the course of the last four hundred years. In examining these musical works, all of which were remarkable for their time and which many still value today, we will consider their identity both as timeless aesthetic objects and as particular moments in cultural history. We will frame our work within the historical, philosophical, and political contexts of the time, and more recent critical assessments will help us evaluate the circumstances that have shaped reception of this repertoire over the past four centuries. In addition to the works and composers treated in our textbook, we will supplement our study throughout the semester with a consideration of the lives and works of individuals whose stories are less well-known. Ultimately, we will work to understand the particular challenges, opportunities, and responsibilities related to continued engagement with so-called “classical” music in the 21st century. Close attention is given to techniques of musical listening, and to details of first performances, with a consideration of the problems involved in assembling such a picture. No previous knowledge of musical notation or terminology is required. 3 credits.
Area: Humanities
A survey of the stylistic features and social contexts of American popular music since the 1950s.
Area: Humanities
Students will be introduced to electronic music production techniques and software, and how both can be used to produce a wide range of genre specific results. Skills such as beat matching, intricate use of quantization, virtual instrument editing, automation, sampling, mixing, mastering, effect usage and use of plugins will be explored.
Area: Humanities
In this course we will undertake a comprehensive survey of sound, audio and the related technology. While covering sound recording from an historical perspective, we'll touch on related material in physics, music, psychology and acoustics. In lab exercises and assignments, students will have the opportunity to learn in a hands-on environment as practical applications of the lecture material are explored. Assignments will include critical listening, in addition to basic recording, editing and mixing of audio. The course will culminate in a comprehensive final project.
Area: Humanities
Introduction to Computer Music is an opportunity for people with no specialized training in music to explore electronic art music as a long-standing, if obscure, body of art, then to participate in creative work in the style. Participants will gain a heuristic understanding of forms of musical composition that operate outside the conventions of regular rhythm and harmony as they record and manipulate sound to sculpt it into original musical works. The lecture portion combines an historical overview of electronic music, rudiments of acoustics and musical perception, and instruction in compositional techniques and in using computers as creative musical tools. The laboratory portion, given at the Digital Media Center, serves as a workshop for creative exploration and for the completion of assigned creative projects including original works of digital sound art.
Area: Humanities
The primary focus of this course is a survey, investigation, and study of jazz music and how it shaped American history from its origins to current times. Upon completion of this course students will be able to: discuss why jazz is important, both musically and culturally; learn the nuances of a new art form; demonstrate that jazz is a huge part of American heritage; explore parallels between jazz and both American and world history; and become a receptive and knowledgeable audience for jazz.
Area: Humanities
The primary focus of this performance/theory course is designed to help students acquire and develop basic language for improvisation in a collaborative environment. Throughout the semester, the course will develop these skills through songs drawn from standard jazz repertoire, examining improvised solos by master musicians, and understanding the application of fundamental theory concepts in performance situations. Enrolled students should be comfortable with theory rudiments such as note reading, scales, and intervals. No textbook is required, but students should have access to an instrument (singers are welcome).
Area: Humanities
This class will explore the way harmonic concepts codified in the western classical tradition over the last few centuries are represented and expanded upon in 20th and 21st century popular music. We will examine a number of harmonic techniques using a wide array of genres, ranging from jazz to Broadway to rock to pop to R&B/soul to hip-hop. This course will focus on listening, analysis, and composition techniques.
Area: Humanities
The study and performance of instrumental chamber music, by audition/permission of instructor only. Sight-reading skills will be evaluated. This course is one credit, will meet for one hour once a week, and has a final performance at the end of the semester. Pre-formed groups preferred, but single auditions accepted with the understanding that a group may not be readily formed for registration.
Area: Humanities
What can American musical theater teach us about our own lives? In this introductory course, students will explore the interdisciplinary relationship between musicals and the wider world by studying, analyzing, and interpreting the history, theory, and craft of significant 20th- and 21st-century musicals (on Broadway and beyond) in the context of the arts, humanities, business, physical and social sciences, technology, and/or additional STEM fields. Students will collaboratively create, implement, and perform their own work of musical theatre as a capstone project.
Area: Humanities
The general purpose of this course is to introduce students to the scholarly study of traditional, popular, and classical music from around the world through reading, discussion, close listening of recordings, and observation of ethnographic and commercial films. We will be primarily concerned with using music as a lens through which to better understand cultural concepts including diaspora, religion, colonialism, creolization, and tradition. Area case studies will include India, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East.
Area: Humanities
A survey course focusing on the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven, whose compositions transformed and revolutionized music of the 19th century. Students will become acquainted with Beethoven's major works, including piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies. No previous musical background is necessary. NOTE: The year 2020 marks the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth.
Area: Humanities
This course will explore the many genres of traditional and popular music that have emerged among the peoples and cultures of the Caribbean region and its Diaspora. We will examine the social, political, and economic issues that have shaped the region’s music and how that music may have intersected with migration, colonization, ethnicity, race and tourism. Using a “participantobservation” approach, students will read about, listen to and research a variety of musical experiences within the relevant sociopolitical context. Students should expect to fully participate in discussions about the assigned readings and music, and should be prepared to conduct their own research and share their own or newly acquired knowledge of contemporary and “historical/traditional” musical themes, and local and regional artists. Our collective goal will be to enjoy as well as to think critically about music, culture and performance and within a moreinformed understanding of the complex, multi-varied and multi-vocal context—know as “The Caribbean”.
Area: Humanities
Many opera scholars have noted that opera abuses its female characters. Many operatic heroines die, whether from violent acts or chronic diseases. However, women in opera also wield great power through their voices as ambitious queens, cunning servants, magical beings, and femmes fatales. In this course we will examine how these female characters operate through explorations of the operas’ historical context, their texts and scores, and modern performance practice. Spanning from the 17th to 21st centuries, the repertoire studied in this class will provide an introduction to opera history. At the same time, we will delve deeply into different ways to do close analyses of opera through the lens of gender, reading the work of such thinkers as Carolyn Abbate, Naomi Andre, Adriana Caverero, Catherine Clément, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
Area: Humanities
In this foundational survey course, students will study aspects of law that shape a career in and beyond the arts. Topics include how to get or grant permission to use copyrighted works, how to read a contract, and how to start or join a business. In addition, through class discussions, students will develop their interdisciplinary and analytical skills in interpreting music and law.
Area: Humanities
The symphony occupies a prominent place within the history of Western classical music in the “long” nineteenth century. At once a canvas for daring innovations in style and form and a genre strongly allied with notions of “tradition,” the nineteenth-century symphony brings together a complex set of issues that illuminate the broader history of music and musical culture of the past 200 years. This course introduces the iconic works of the symphonic tradition, with a focus on music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler. As we aim to discover what made this music so remarkable in its time and why so many people still care about it today, we will consider each symphony both as a timeless work of art and as a particular moment in cultural history. Close attention will be given to the techniques of musical listening, and our work will be deeply rooted within the historical, philosophical, and political contexts of the time. There are no pre-requisites for the course apart from a willingness to open one’s ears and to engage creatively and critically with some of the most extraordinary music ever written.
Area: Humanities
This course examines composers, works, artistic trends, and contexts of music-making coexisting at a single moment in time, the year 1724. Subjects include familiar figures (e.g., Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi) and lesser-known individuals (e.g., Christoph Graupner, Carlo Tessarini). Works include staples of the performance repertoire (e.g., Handel’s Giulio Cesare, Bach’s John Passion) and others that never caught on (e.g., Ariosti’s Vespasiano). The synchronous approach of the course emphasizes shared styles, intersecting genres, and overlapping spheres of influence. The reading list emphasizes primary materials. All this combines to provide a novel perspective of baroque music, a snapshot of composers and works as they circulated within a contemporaneous landscape.
Area: Humanities
What underlies our aesthetic response to music? How and why are we able to identify certain sounds as music? To what extent are music and natural language similar? What is it about music that evokes such powerful emotions such as happiness and sadness? What is unique to musical creativity? Examining such questions from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophical perspectives, this course explores relevant research and theory in the emerging domain of music perception and cognition. Students will complete a final research paper on the topic of their choice that integrates the course material.
Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the similarities and differences between music and language, the effects of musical training on cognitive development, and the expressive power of music, with an introduction to music and its role in film. We will read relevant research and theory on these topics from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, musicology, and philosophical perspectives.
Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The history, technology, and performance of Western European musical instruments, their precursors, and their non-western counterparts, addressed by experts and explored on visits to historic collections.Recommended prerequisite: AS.376.231 "Western Classical Music".
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the bio-cultural evolution of music in light of recent interdisciplinary research on the social bases of human cognitive evolution, and explore its implications for current debates in musicology, ethno- musicology, psychology of music, and human cognitive evolution.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his first opera in 1767 at the age of 11. By the time of his death at age 35, he had written 22 full-length operas. Many of these operas are still performed today in opera houses around the world. In this course, we will discuss the enduring popularity of these works. We will discover how these operas were created, delving into the many important collaborations Mozart had with singers, librettists, impresarios, and patrons. We will analyze the words and music of the operas and how they combine to create three-dimensional characters for which his operas are known, such as the melancholy but determined Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, or the cowardly but loyal Papageno in The Magic Flute. Cultural norms have shifted dramatically between Mozart’s time and ours, and we will examine how Mozart’s operas have been received from their premieres through to today. We will think about how the operas have been translated, adapted, and circulated to different audiences in different eras and locations. Finally, we will reflect on our position as modern audience members, watching recent productions of the operas which reinterpret the works in alternative settings or times and studying the ways in which opera companies promote Mozart’s works.
Area: Humanities