Courses
General Information
Academic Credit for Music Performance
Fees
MUS 101 - Private Instruction
This course is open to all students regardless of ability or previous experience. Private lessons are available for all orchestral instruments, guitar, harpsichord, piano, and voice, as well as non-Western instruments. Students will take weekly lessons with their private instructor. If taken for credit, students are required to satisfy weekly individual-practice requirements and/or listening assignments (minimum 5 hours/week), and attend (virtually or in person) one off-campus music event (concert, lecture, master class, etc.). Students will perform publicly at least once during the semester or take a performance exam at the end of the term.
MUS 103 - American Roots Music Ensemble
This practicum offers study of American folk traditions from the nineteenth and twentieth century through applied group learning and performance of songs from this repertoire, both with traditional acoustic instruments (including but not limited to bowed and plucked strings) and vocals. The class operates as a band, democratically choosing songs to learn together and creating arrangements specific to the ensemble's unique abilities. The group will perform several times during the semester.
MUS 104 - Reed Orchestra
Availability of credit is dependent on instruments needed for repertoire to be performed in any given semester. The orchestra rehearses and performs works from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It presents one or two concerts each semester.
MUS 105 - Reed Chorus
The chorus, open to all members of the Reed community, rehearses and performs works from all periods of music, often with the orchestra.
MUS 106 - Treble Voices Ensemble
The Treble Voices Ensemble rehearses and performs vocal music from many historic periods and styles written for upper voices (sopranos and altos).
MUS 107 - Collegium Musicum
The Collegium rehearses and performs vocal music from many historic periods suitable for a small group.
MUS 108 - Jazz Ensemble
Jazz ensembles selected by the instructor rehearse regularly and give one performance each semester. Rehearsals include improvisational techniques, soloing, accompanying, and jazz theory.
MUS 109 - Chamber Music
Available by audition when there are enough students at an appropriate level to form an ensemble of one player per part. This course consists of weekly coaching sessions and several performances during the semester. Students should expect to practice individually for 2.5 hours per week.
MUS 110 - Foundations of Music Theory and Literacy
This course is an introduction to music theory and literacy, including notation of pitch and rhythm, intervals, melody, instrumentation/timbre, scales, keys and tonality, pulse and syncopation, triads and seventh chords, chord progressions and cadences. Lectures are often interactive and involve singing, moving, clapping, chanting, and otherwise embodying musical concepts. Labs will includeÌýsimilar activities from lecture in smaller groups, as well as identification and construction of structures introduced in lecture onÌýpiano and dictation of basic rhythms and melodies.Ìý
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
MUS 116 - Intro to Digital Audio Production
This course is an introductory 100-level studio course to acclimate students to the technical foundations and key concepts in digital audio production and realizing music in the studio:Ìý microphone types, acoustics, digital editing, mixing, mastering, MIDI orchestration, sampling, MIDI mapping, and routing audio. Digital audio workstations (colloquially abbreviated as "DAWs") softwares will be tools used for creating music. Students will complete a series of creative assignments that will explore timbre, structure, density, and other aesthetic aspects of capturing music in the DAW to establish technical proficiency, and set the technical foundation needed and required for subsequent upper-level creative music electives in time-based music. Listening and reading assignments will cover key cultural moments and practices that have been linked to specific technologies. Collaborative projects and peer review will push students to consider how to record styles of music outside of their own personal interests.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 150 - The Cultural Study of Music
Music carries a tremendous range of meanings and functions, serving as both a symbol and generator of other forces in social life and history. Taking a critical approach to the study of music as a cultural phenomenon, this course will examine how diverse modes of attention to musical and other sounds contributes to larger struggles over sameness and difference, belonging and exclusion, and the status of music as a privileged category of social experience. We will focus on developing a critical vocabulary and particular mode of listening in order to explore and directly engage with these struggles.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 152 - Popular Music and Alternative Histories
What histories and stories do songs tell about gender, race, sexuality, and colonialism in the Americas? This class focuses on how some artists, performances and songs shape non-hegemonic connections between peoples and places in the Americas, while centering on the role of people often taken for granted in the formation of popular music genres. Topics include: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and rock and roll; Indigenous popular musics and decolonizing struggles; music performance and feminist protests; popular music and trans* and queer activism; Nina Simone and the civil rights movement; Black feminisms and hip hop; Afro-Latino American women spiritual leaders and popular music.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 154 - Popular Music in Portland and The Pacific Northwest
This course will take a place-based approach to the culture, politics, and history of popular music in the city of Portland and larger Pacific Northwest. What can the work of popular musicians both past and present tell us about the place we live in today? How have the complex workings of the city and the region shaped the culture of music here? Drawing upon a wide variety of listening and reading examples and foregrounding the sound and voices of Portland's diverse group of popular artists, this course will provide a critical entry point for understanding Portland's historically significant musical communities and introduce broader questions regarding the situated politics of popular music.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 205 - Musicianship and Aural Skills
This course guides music students in the development of their musicianship and aural skills in tandem with topics and concepts covered in MUS 210 (Intermediate Music Theory -ÌýFundamental Harmony) into a more embodied , integrated, and time-based understanding of textbook concepts. Class activities will include melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic dictations; group reading of assigned musical excerpts; conducting; rhythmic and harmonic transcriptions; discussions of challenges and strategies in music making; and student presentations of assignments - with the aim of integrating the visual, sonic, kinesthetic, and holistic learning of music into a somatic understanding.ÌýThis course will culminate in long form aural transcriptions, notational engraving, translations between time-based modalities in digital audio production software to engraved notational literacy, and ultimately composing an original notated arrangement of student-selected songs for duo, trio, and small ensemble performance.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
MUS 207 - Musical Dialogues Across Disciplines
This course is a practice-based music composition seminar where students will engage in cross-disciplinary dialogues with works of literature, visual art, dance, and film in order to generate original musical compositions and hybrid multimedia works. Utilizing the sensory language offered by each medium, students will explore the synergistic and synesthetic language between the visual/sonic, sonic/spatial, spatial/temporal, verbal/nonverbal, and gestural and embodied languages to craft unique musical works inspired by and generated in conversation with these narrative and temporal mediums. Final projects will be presented in hybrid forms of multimedia and time-based arts.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 210 - Intermediate Music Theory - Functional Harmony: Voice Leading and Tonal Harmony
This course examines the conventions, fundamentals, and inner workings of tonal harmony as developed by composers of the Western art music tradition from the start of the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century through the lens of classical and contemporary music practices. Through written exercises and analysis of selected works in the historic canon, students will identify and compose musical elements such as harmonic rhythm and progressions, cadences, nonchord tones, secondary dominant chords, modal mixture, form, and idiomatic languages of musical movements from history to modern and popular music today.ÌýA supplemental keyboard practiceÌýwill reinforce aural and kinesthetic learning, through rote, repetition, and embodied learning of concepts from lecture.Ìý
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
MUS 215 - Make Some Noise: An Introduction to Electronic Music
This course is an introduction to electronic music composition, audio production, and sound design. Students will build skills in using a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) in order to create original music, experimenting with analog synthesis and exploring field recording techniques. Coursework will cover digital audio processing, synthesis techniques, and critical analysis of electronic music traditions spanning a carefully curated and expansive collection of listenings encompassing both popular and experimental genres. Students will develop skills in editing, mixing, and composing electronic music, culminating in a final project and a concert featuring their compositions. Emphasis will be placed on creative experimentation and critical listening. Students will only need a computer and a subscription to Spotify-no fancy microphones, plugins, or expensive software are needed (nor, in fact, allowed for class assignments or projects).
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 217 - Women in Electronic Music
This courseÌýis designed as both a survey and studio course. This course will first examine and analyze the influential and seminal works of electroacoustic pioneers Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Bjork, Laurie Anderson, Maryanne Amacher, Wendy Carlos, Janet Cardiff, Laurie Spiegel and others - to extrapolate musical techniques, technology-based approaches, to apply and inspire original student compositions within today's means of digital audio production, synthesis, and digital audio workstations. Students will engage in aspects of synthesis, electronic songwriting, beatmaking, narrative storytelling, sampling, field recordings, and audio phenomenon - in a hands-on setting.ÌýIn a predominantly male field, and shifting landscape of technology - we will explore how these notable female figures transcended stereotypes, norms, society and cultural expectations to create new worlds and new possibilities to inspire new contemporary creations today.ÌýStudents will work on creative final projects (individual or collaborative) developed in consultation with the instructor.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 221 - Form and Listening
Designed for both music majors and nonmajors, this class will consider music history from the perspective of studying and listening through musical form. Students will learn about recurring principles and historically situated formal tendencies encountered in a range of repertory, including concert music (strophic, through-composed, fugue, and sonata forms), popular music and jazz (12-bar blues and verse-chorus structures), and electronic and experimental practices. Repertory will be considered in historical context and will be explored through such concepts asÌýrepetition, contrast, and return; stability and instability; teleological vs. looping and cyclical processes; and improvisation.ÌýThe course will teach students to hear and critically assess musical form and think about the ways that the structured presentation of musical ideas can shape meaning and experience for listeners.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 222 - Topics in American Music
This course studies selected examples of music created since 1800, focusing on musical activity in the Americas, with particular emphasis on the United States. Repertory will include concert music, popular genres, and music making in both public and private contexts in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In discerning and critically examining questions pertaining to race, gender, place, and migration-and learning how to formulate music-historical questions of their own interest-students will be introduced to music history, sometimes known as musicology, not as a static body of knowledge but as a practice of inquiry that continues to evolve in compelling ways.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 238 - Music and the Cold War United States
Post-World War II negotiations of anticommunism, national identity, and global membership reverberated throughout U.S. musical life in the 1950s. These sociopolitical developments impacted the careers of musicians as disparate as Aaron Copland, Hank Williams, and Dizzy Gillespie; shaped the reception of repertories ranging from experimental music to the Broadway musical to rock and roll; and transformed the meanings of ethnic assimilation, the civil rights movement, and ideologies of modernism and populism. Through study of selected music examples and relevant historical literature, this course will examine the performance, composition, and consumption of music in the United States during the early Cold War period.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 247 - Improvisation: Exploring the Art of Musical Spontaneity
This course will introduce students to improvisation-with a particular focus on jazz and American popular music traditions-and examines improvisation as both a musical and cultural practice. This is open to students with widely varying musical backgrounds and levels of experience, though there is an emphasis on performance, therefore a moderate level of proficiency on an instrument or voice is strongly encouraged. Key skills we will develop-in both individual and group settings-are reading, interpreting, and writing lead sheets; building and realizing chord progressions; reharmonization; writing melodies; and creating spontaneous musical material/ideas. Through readings, listenings, and class discussion, we will explore improvisation as a means of storytelling and communication, and how it can give voice to personal histories, reinforce or disrupt expectations, and forge unspoken connections between sound, space, and the people who fill it. Other topics we will investigate are jazz harmony, genre definitions and idiosyncrasies, blues progressions, arranging, and ensemble interaction, and survey the broader context and social histories of improvisation in American music. The course concludes with a final performance project (individual or group), in which students are encouraged to experiment with improvisational approaches in an encouraging and supportive environment.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 251 - Music, Sound, and Climate Change
Can music be a tool for socioenvironmental justice? What listening sensibilities do we need to nurture in a world of environmental catastrophe and predatory violence? How have environments been changing sonically and how have people been musicalizing their loss and resistance? This course addresses climate crisis through a focus on the acoustic while analyzing contrasting notions of nature, preservation, life, and sound that emerge as people struggle to live, ritualize life in relation to land, and craft joy in the struggle. Class relies on interdisciplinary multimedia material focusing on different parts of the world, with emphasis on decolonial, feminist, Black, and Indigenous perspectives.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 253 - Sound and the Environment
This course will engage with the many ways sound mediates the meaning and experience of our natural and built environments, exploring what and how we are able to know about our world through listening. Drawing on an interdisciplinary set of literature from music, sound, media, and science and technology studies and developing a series of hands-on projects for the critical documentation and representation of sonic environments, students will gain practical and theoretical understanding of how sound articulates and speaks to larger issues of environmental and social justice in a variety of places, times, and contexts.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 254 - Africa in the Black Musical Imagination
"What is Africa to me?" asked the Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen in his 1925 poem "Heritage." This course will introduce students to the ways and ends to which Black musicians, primarily in the United States, have explored this question. The responses have varied, ranging from early twentieth-century musical theater reconciling modern identities with "dark continent" stereotypes, to the cultural-political embrace of Afrocentricity in Sixties jazz and soul, to the Afro-diasporic parable of Beyoncé's 2020 visual album Black Is King. This is not a course on music from the African continent. Rather, through suggestive musical examples and literature on such topics as Ethiopianism, African retentions, and the politics of origins, students will consider how and why Black musicians have persistently asserted and negotiated relationships with Africa-whether as a homeland or as a space of fantasy-and the fluidity of these relationship over time.
MUS 256 - Sensing the Amazon: Sound, Song, and Image
What is the Amazon? How have we been listening to it? Can we sense (and make sense of) its devastation and abundance from far away? The Amazon is a complex region, home to diverse social groups and modes of living. This course takes the Amazon as a case study for engaging in sound, song, and audiovisual productions in terms of the ethics of their making, the imaginaries they propose, and the places they create. Through texts and multimedia material about/from the Amazon and listening and recording exercises, students will examine clashing and coexisting sensorial histories of the region and critically engage with how the Amazon is perceived as forest, home, resource, and nature under threat.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 257 - This Land is Whose Land?: Woody Guthrie and the Ambivalent Politics of US Folk Music
This course examines the life, work, and legacy of the multidisciplinary American folk artist and musician Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), taking the contested reception of his music, writing, and other art as a frame for exploring larger issues regarding the politics of culture and belonging in the 21st century United States. On the one hand, Guthrie is now canonized as an artistic champion of working-class and other communities that have been excluded from capitalist economic development in the US. On the other hand, his work conjures and celebrates a vision of the American landscape and people that is largely congruent with the broader project of settler colonialism. Drawing upon a wide variety of listening and reading examples from Guthrie and those working in the wake of his influence, past and present, this course provides a critical point of entry regarding the sound and politics of US folk music today.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 259 - Afro-Asian Musical Engagements
The focus of this course will be the wide-ranging collaborations, borrowings, and cross-ethnic imaginaries of Black and Asian and Asian American musicians. Drawing on a body of interdisciplinary literature on jazz, hip-hop, K-Pop, and other popular styles, students will study how scholars have theorized the intentional engagements through which performers have employed musical sound to form and perform interracial rapport, pursue politically-motivated solidarity, and embody racial identities modeled on concepts of Blackness and Asianness. Thinking beyond white/non-white binaries, a central question will be: How might Afro-Asian musical projects reshape how we think about racial categories and the social processes through which race is dialectically constructed and deconstructed?
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 271 - Studying Popular Music
This course is an introduction to some of the key aesthetic, theoretical, and methodological concerns in the burgeoning field of popular music studies, which has explored the performance, (re)production, and consumption of popular music. Seeking to develop listening skills and drawing on both field-defining work and new scholarship, the course will explore topics including the analysis of recorded music, the politics of style and genre, the role of technological and social mediation, the production of intersectional identities, and fan reception. Though the focus will be music originating in the United States, students will also consider the circulation of popular music in international contexts.
MUS 284 - Songs, (Un)Covered: Imitation, Interpretation, and Innovation
This course investigates the creative and philosophical dimensions of covering, remixing, and (re)interpreting existing musical works. Beginning with the cover song as a musical phenomenon, we will explore how musicians transform original works through (re)arrangement, performance practice, and stylistic (re)contextualization. Students will engage deeply with influential artists such as Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Pete Seeger, Led Zeppelin, and many others, while also greatly expanding outward to examine how similar acts of imitation and (re)interpretation shape literature, theatre, law, visual art, politics, and the sciences. Through the lens of mimesis and (re)presentation, topics include authorship and the ontology of a musical work, performance, phenomenology, intertextuality, and the anxiety of influence. The course culminates in student-driven projects where students creatively or critically "cover" a work, applying theoretical frameworks to produce their own interpretation, whether through performance, writing, or interdisciplinary media.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 291 - Women and Performance in 1960s Popular Music
If U.S. popular music in the 1950s exhibited a relatively narrow bandwidth of performances by women, the possibilities-in sound, style, approach, and affect-expanded dramatically in the 1960s. This course studies how women popular musicians in the sixties, along with their audiences, enacted these diversifying musical performances. Particularly influential for this multiplication of performance modes were seminal developments in second-wave feminism, the cresting civil rights movement, sixties counterculture, and transformations within the music industry. Students will cultivate skills for close listening to recordings and analysis of musical style, and will read literature by a range of scholars thinking through musicology, media studies, U.S. history, African American studies, feminist theory, and performance studies about such artists as Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, the Supremes, Astrid Gilberto, Barbra Streisand, Loretta Lynn, Miriam Makeba, and others. We will also consider how musical performances by 1960s women were mobilized intersectionally with racial, ethnic, class, political, and geographic identities.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 305 - Musical Ethnography
This course will introduce the theory and practice of musical ethnography, the key mode of ethnomusicological research and representation, to advanced students in ethnomusicology, anthropology, and related disciplines. Combining critical readings on ethnography from music scholarship, anthropology, and a variety of disciplines with hands-on projects (including the production and analysis of field recordings, musical transcriptions, and various forms of qualitative ethnographic data), the course will prepare students to both conduct and critically reflect upon ethnographic research.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 306 - Writing about Music
Music is a tricky subject for the writer. On the one hand, the technical vocabulary of music studies is specialized such that it is accessible only to the narrowest of audiences. On the other hand, what often seems most important about our experiences with music can feel nearly impossible to capture in words at all. In this writing-intensive course, we will navigate these extremes via the study and practice of writing about music, from general descriptive writing to the many genres of music criticism, journalism, ethnography, memoir, and other creative nonfiction forms. Through conference-style discussion of exemplary work in these areas and regular peer workshopping of our in-progress writing projects, students will cultivate both a critical understanding and practical aptitude regarding the hows and whys of compelling writing about music.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 308 - Music as Material Culture
Questions of materiality are surprisingly absent in scholarly accounts of music, which tend to emphasize ideologies of ephemerality and performance, on the one hand, and the transcendent monumentality of "the work," on the other. Nevertheless, modern musical culture is saturated with things: sheet music, sound recordings, audiovisual materials, digital file formats, and the articulating equipment they require, to name only a few objects of everyday musical consumption and engagement. How can we account for what Jane Bennett (2010) calls the "vibrant" materiality of these musical objects? How do the different materialities of music relate to one another across affective networks of style, genre, and media production? How do musical materials become subjects of knowledge regarding the past? How is that knowledge mobilized in the practice of collecting and managing historic material culture? How might ongoing practices of remediation challenge our assumptions regarding the stabilities of material forms? Employing a variety of methodological perspectives and drawing upon a wide array of listening examples, this course will introduce students to debates regarding music as material culture and question the ontological presuppositions of contemporary music scholarship.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 310 - Advanced Topics in Harmony and Rhythm
In this semester-long course, students will examine and creatively apply select advanced topics in harmony and rhythm as observed in a wide range of music from the late 1800s to the present. Through a combination of readings, written exercises, listening, study of musical scores, and composition projects, students will build on their experience from MUS 210Ìýand engage with topics including chromatic predominant chords and other expansions of the phrase model, modulations, cadential evasions, Neo-Riemannian transformations, chord modes, mixed and asymmetric meters, metric modulation, and symmetrical, progressive, and other large-scale tonal plans.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 315 - Electroacoustic Composition
Utilizing original field recordings and samples of varying spectra, registers, textures, qualities, and durations, students will learn and apply creative recording techniques and dynamic approaches in audio manipulation and studio transformations to create distinct sonic worlds and musical languages. Engaging in practices of musique concrète and informed by methods and forms employed by contemporary electroacoustic artists such as Matmos, Alvin Lucier, Janet Cardiff, Christina Kubisch, La Monte Young, Björk, and Laurie Anderson, students will work towards the final presentation of a generative, narrative, musical work featuring original aural architectures and crafted works of time-based sensory storytelling. Students are encouraged to perform in their own works, engage in studio collaborations, and compose and present final works for traditional and nontraditional settings.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 316 - Composition: Songwriting and Storytelling
Students will develop skills in song composition drawing upon a range of genres and styles, including rock, rap, blues, opera, music-theatre, folk, protest, and jazz standard. We will examine relevant models of these styles to inform composition, and hone musicianship skills in hearing melodies, rhythms, and harmonic progressions and in setting different kinds of lyrics. Students will notate songs as lead sheets and then make arrangements for performances at a final concert.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 317 - Introduction to Conducting
What skills and responsibilities are expected of the conductor of a musical ensemble? When and for what purposes is gesture necessary? How can this role adapt to meet the individuals in the room and their strengths? This course will offer an introduction to the craft and tasks of conducting, with emphasis on score study and analysis, audiating and imagining the score, keyboard and score reading skills, basics of gesture and baton technique, rehearsal methods and strategies, and the evolving considerations of programming and performance practice. Students will start the term by introducing a song by ear to the class, develop skills and awareness in conducting labs that will involve preparing to sing and/or play assigned musical excerpts and leading one another to gain real-time feedback, and end the term by conducting one of the ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ choirs in a public lab setting.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 318 - Sonic World Building (Music, Sound, Place)
In this survey and studio composition course, students will explore the intersection of music and architecture -Ìýactivating architectural spaces acoustically (through resonance), historically (through memory), and considering the spatial and site-specific nature of music-making and place-making in studio practice applied to architecture and spatial considerations that affect narrative, and experience.ÌýStudents will engage in collecting original field recordings, to source material, and produce final projects culminating in recordings, sound walks, spatialized sound installations, that demonstrate sonic world-building from original recorded media, to create spaces of transport, suspension, and narrative. This course will study the works of sound artists Alvin Lucier, Janet Cardiff, Hildegard Westerkamp, Jana Windren, Christina Kubisch, and others - utilizing specialty microphones to create unique soundscapes and sonic worlds, and ultimately, exploring ways in how architecture serves as an instrument itself.ÌýÌý
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 355 - Black Women's Music as Intellectual History
Music created and performed by Black people of African descent is most often valued for the vitality of its cultural contributions to the United States and the world. This emphasis on Black music as representative of Black culture, however celebratory, tends to obscure the ways in which music has given aural expression to trajectories of Black thought and ideas- that is, the ways it has been nourished by and has constituted Black intellectual history. Focusing on music-making by Black women, this course will consider how musical sound and performance has joined Black thinkers in conversation about such topics as historiography, political theory, feminism, spirituality, truth, goodness, and beauty. Through study of a range of artists, genres, and musical examples, students will critically assess the call and response between Black women's music and lineages of Black thought about fundamental humanistic questions: What is justice? What does it mean to be free? What does it mean to be human?
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
MUS 360 - Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865-1965
The civil rights movement in the United States, demanding full citizenship for African Americans, is most commonly associated with the momentous sociopolitical developments of the 1950s and 1960s. Increasingly, scholars have situated this "classical" period of the movement within a broader historical arc encompassing an ongoing "Black freedom struggle" that dates to Reconstruction. Over the course of this century of struggle and resistance, music has continuously been a terrain on which U.S. citizens conceptualized, articulated, and negotiated the terms of an equitable society. Through close study of primary and secondary historical texts and musical repertory that will include the spiritual, jazz, and concert music, this course will explore ways in which ideas about musical sound and musical performance, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War II, articulated the stakes of the Black freedom struggle and the meanings of freedom.
MUS 372 - Music and Voice
The bel canto ideal of Italian opera, the "flow" produced by a rapper's delivery, the crooning of pop vocalists, the growl of heavy metal vocals, the microtonal inflections of Indian classical singing: such examples indicate a range of vocal practices that shape the production and experience of musical sound. What functions are served by the presence of a voice in music? Is a voice simply a bearer of words, or something more? Through study of selected musical examples and relevant music-historical and theoretical "voice studies" literature, this course will explore the manifestations, roles, and significance of the voice in music, as deployed artistically and as engaged by listeners to make meaning of musical experience. We will also consider how singing voices become linked to gender, race, ethnicity, class, and geographic region, and the ways in which the voice has been reimagined through avant-garde composition and technological intervention.