Global Arc

This course will help students to develop new approaches as an improviser via transcribing solos of various jazz icons and analyzing their melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic content. We will also implement analytical tools from modern classical music (not typical used in jazz) and discuss how these techniques can be reverse-engineered to create fresh ideas and new modalities in how we organize improvisational scenarios.

We will study Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas with a special emphasis on the later ones. The class is centered on theoretical analysis that requires an advanced knowledge of tonal syntax.

Songs and Songwriting will offer undergraduates the opportunity to study songs and songcraft in an intense, supportive small-group workshop. Songs are mysterious musical forms. They can be as simple as nursery rhymes or as complicated as miniature symphonies. They are inherently multidisciplinary, engaging one's ear for language as much as for music. They demand a knack for melody as well as an architectural sense of form and proportion. They rely on timeworn formulas and cliches, but there is no blueprint for writing them; a great song always catches you off guard.

This course presents a cross-disciplinary and multi-modal approach to African music, dance, and culture. Co-taught by a master drummer and choreographer (Tarpaga) and an ethnomusicologist (Steingo), students will explore African and African diasporic performance arts through readings, discussions, listening, film analysis, music performance, and composition.

Composers and film-makers explore the role of music within Film and moving image work. A look at historic examples, scoring styles and techniques, and the choices that directors and composers make, focusing particularly on films from the silent era, films without dialogue, documentaries, experimental (animation) films and finally narrative films. Composers will be encouraged to respond creatively by composing the score for a short film, or composing one to three cues (around five minutes of music) to a given score. Non-composers will be encouraged to write about a music cue or score that they find especially interesting.

An introduction to the varieties of musical experience in 19th-century America through the Civil War, paying particular attention to popular music, classical music, hymns, and African American traditions. The course will relate these experiences to contemporaneous literature, painting, sociocultural, political, and racial conditions. Two 90-minute classes.

This course will examine a variety of manifestations of folk music in different cultures of the world, with a specific emphasis on examples from France and the U.S., and will study key moments of folk music revival from the nineteenth century to the present. With a particular focus on singing and the voice, we will explore the practices of folk music-making and their relation to concepts of identity, nationalism, protest, preservation, and innovation. By studying revival movements, we will seek to understand how these musical practices have influenced thinking on history, authenticity, and belonging in contemporary society.

Explores the significance of music in the work of Shakespeare. The approach is threefold: (1) weekly readings of scenes that are informed by contemporary currents of musical thought, and/or involve songs played on stage, and which depend for their interpretation of our understanding of those currents; (2) analysis of fundamental musical concepts as they are treated across Shakespeare's output, which might otherwise seem irrelevant or counter-intuitive to modern audiences; (3) the reading of an entire play in which music contributes to character delineation and dramatic development.

This course examines the role of sound and listening in the constitution of culture. Classes will be evenly split between historical and theoretical analysis, on the one hand, and practice-based explorations of sound, on the other. Topics of exploration include: audio technology, sound and space, psychoacoustics, and acoustemology. We will engage these topics through close readings of theoretical texts and through a range of sound-based practices such as field recording, sound walks, spectral analysis, sonic art, and "tutorial diversions.

This class is centered on the exploration of rhythmic practices and organizational principles in a wide variety of musical contexts: West African Drumming, European Classical Music, Caribbean Traditional Music, American Pop Music, Jazz and Contemporary Experimental Music. The course will toggle between two major components: 1 - "Hands-On" performance practice 2 - Analysis and comparison of organizational principles of rhythm in a variety of musical traditions.