Global Arc

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.

An introduction to a variety of 20th-century approaches to composition. Emphasis on understanding different techniques, syntaxes, and musical languages through exercises in compositional emulations and in performance projects of student and studied works, using available performance skills of participants. Prerequisite: 206 or instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar, one preceptorial.

The course will deal closely with a small number of works from the tonal repertoire and will serve as a critical introduction to several pertinent and influential analytical methodologies, including motivic, formal, semiotic, and voice-leading analysis. The focus will be on the musical and aesthetic values that each method either enhances or attenuates. Prerequisite: 206 or instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar.

A composition course for independent, self-directed composers. Most of the class will be spent working on a single piece. Students will present their work-in-progress to the class weekly or biweekly depending on enrollment. We will have a concert of final projects at the end of the semester, with all student pieces to be performed by So Percussion, the music department's world-renowned ensemble-in-residence.

An exploration of the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic principles of the bebop paradigm. The course includes analysis of representative works by various jazz masters and will place a strong emphasis on student projects in improvisation and composition. Prerequisites: 105 or permission of instructor. Two 90-minute classes.