Global Arc

Examines post-World War II blues, rock music mostly of the late sixties and early seventies, and the connections between them. Explores wider musical and extramusical connections. Two lectures, one class.

This course explores the formation of popular music genres throughout the world -- from Johannesburg and Accra, to Mexico City, Istanbul, and Jakarta, among other places. We will analyze the relationship between global processes of music circulation, on the one hand, and highly localized musical styles, on the other. By listening carefully, we will discover that the contemporary "world system" is not always one of smooth integration, but is instead characterized by friction, distortion, and noise.

From the singing entertainments of Parisian café-concerts, to the historical revisions of grand opera, to the social critiques of banlieue rappers, music has been central to the cultural and social developments of the French nation. This course explores a survey of music across many genres - opera, concert music, sacred music, song, dance music, folk, rock, rap - to investigate how music participated in, shaped, and fueled many debates in French society from the Enlightenment onwards.

A "hands-on" course that explores music from before 1600 using the pedagogical methods of the period. Medieval and Renaissance techniques of sight-singing, memorization, improvisation, and harmonization will be learned. Modern computer technology will also be used to investigate the deeper mystical and philosophical content of music from this period. Two 90-minute classes. Prerequisite: ability to read modern music notation comfortably.

This interdisciplinary, team-taught course examines the ways that female (and male) characters have been heard and seen on the operatic stage both past and present. We will examine performance conventions, gender identity, and the multidisciplinary aspect of opera, with some brief some excursions into film and popular idioms. Topics include artifice, agency, domesticity, desire, and violence.

How does one attend to a musical performance? What conventions govern the ways in which compositions begin,continue and end? How relevant are historical and cultural data to acts of engaged listening? Conceived as part lecture and part workshop, this course seeks answers to these questions through a combination of guided, in-class listening and reflection on the art of listening. The core repertory includes canonical works by Beethoven, Mahler and Stravinsky; supplementary listening draws from an eclectic mix of works of 'high' and 'low' provenance. Emphasis on music as heard, with little recourse to notation or external factors.

This course introduces students to key methodological, technical, creative, and disciplinary issues entailed in the study and making of music. Co-taught by a composer and a musicologist, the class will involve making, writing about, and analyzing music. The seminar is also intended as a space for music concentrators to convene and collaborate.

Students will learn and practice techniques to improve aural comprehension of theoretical materials introduced in other music courses. Through exercises in sight singing, conducting patterns, clefs, melodic dictation, improvisation, keyboard harmonization, and harmonic dictation, they will engage in a variety of activities to improve their command of musical notation and materials as well as their overall comprehension as listeners. The aural comprehension of orchestra score reading will also be addressed.

In this course we will try to understand the complex phenomenon of "tonality." We will theorize about harmony, voice leading, scales and study works by Schubert, Chopin, Wagner, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Reich and contemporary jazz.

Story, song and the written word share a common and ancient heritage in the Irish Tradition. In this seminar series we will explore the rich tapestry that comprises the written word in Irish Language Literature and Song and examine how oral forms of artistic expression continue to enrich a nation's literature and music to this very day. The series will explore the shared histories of Irish Language Poetry and the Sean Nós song tradition, how oral culture finds expression in Irish Theatre and how older oralities still find potent representation and viability in a wide span of contemporary Music Culture, from Opera to Traditional Music.