MUSIC 103: The Materials and Design of Music
This course is an introduction to the basic elements of Western musical notation and design. It introduces a set of conceptual tools that help to explain how the unfolding of musical experience is structured, and provides students with a vocabulary for discussing and analyzing sounds construed under the rubric of music. Together we will engage in exercises that employ close reading, formal description, performance, and model composition, attempting to create a living laboratory of musical parameters in the classroom. In addition to the Western tradition, we will also explore some of the basic building blocks of jazz, popular styles, and specific non-Western traditions. By the end of the semester, students will be able to:
- Recognize and use the written symbols and vocabulary of Western music.
- Perform simple notated pieces vocally or at the keyboard.
- Identify, describe, and explain the function of basic harmonic and rhythmic structures.
- Understand and employ various systems within which sound is rationalized in the form of a composition. Students can achieve success in this course without previous musical knowledge.
MUSIC 201: Tonal Harmony
Tonal Harmony is a second semester course in theory and practice. Students develop a working knowledge of processes and forms in tonal music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and use these skills to discuss principles related to tonal harmony in the context of more recent musics. The course combines written work (harmonic writing, composition exercises, analysis) with musicianship skills (dictation, keyboard, sightsinging). The skills and resources accumulate gradually, as do the skills learned in the acquisition of a new language.
The course provides opportunities to explore a variety of topics related to music theory and practice. This includes exploration of the principles of sound, compositional techniques, as well as group performances for the class. The primary focus of the course will be on Western music but will also include workshops and presentations on non- Western musical traditions.
MUSIC 202: Music Theory and Analysis
This course focuses on two foundational aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Western tonal music: harmony and form. Harmony is the study of sororities in combination with each other, their qualities and configurations; their relative importance and function within the musical fabric. Form is the overarching design of musical experience as it unfolds in time. Through exercises in analysis and model composition we will seek more intimate knowledge of the drama that musical tones convey in compositions as small as songs and as large as symphonies. By the end of the semester, students will be able to:
- Recognize, describe, and explain the function of complex harmonic structures.
- Identify, understand, and scrutinize forms used in Western art music such as binary, ternary, fugue, variation, rondo, and sonata.
- Use knowledge about harmonic structures and formal procedures to produce a close reading of a musical object.
MUSIC 208: Post-Tonal Music Theory
At the dawn of the 20th century, European composers began to experiment with a radically new and completely decentered tonal language. Leaving the practice of tonality behind them, these composers used unorthodox numerical relationships to create formal links and motivic connections between the sounds of their compositions. Post-tonal theory represents the body of scholarship that attempts systematically to examine the formal procedures and properties associated with this modernist music; it also represents one attempt to understand the relationships between musical pitches that hold outside the framework of tonality. This course will serve as a general introduction to post-tonal music theory and will also serve as an introduction to the music of the Second Viennese School: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Beyond the music of these composers, we will also contemplate applications of post-tonal theory to more recent music.
MUSIC 242: Baroque and Classical Music
At the end of the eighteenth century, an aesthetic revolution with music at its center gave birth to what we now call modernity. The music that led up to and helped to create that transformation—the music of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe— is some of the most widely celebrated and revered in our contemporary moment. But this music’s place of privilege in the canon of Western musical artworks has, however, given us a false sense of familiarity with it. When we begin to look closer at this music that otherwise might seem familiar, an entire world of affective shocks, social commentaries, elaborate dances, finely crafted images, inside jokes, and carefully planned dramas reveals itself to us. Understanding the logic with which this music operated can help us to better understand the transformations in aesthetic thought it helped to effect and, therefore, to better understand our world’s current configuration of aesthetics, politics, and feeling. This course will provide students with the tools necessary to decipher seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music and aesthetics and will invite students to speculate on the relevance of these bodies of creativity and thought to the present day. Repertoire considered will include the music of Monteverdi, Lully, Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. In addition to music written in Europe, we will also together investigate music written in the Spanish colonies of South America during the eighteenth century.
CHUM 351: Melodrama Since 1700
Although today melodrama calls up ideas related to film, the term has musical origins: it originally indicated a work in which melos (music) and spoken drama were united in one multimedia format. Eighteenth-century melodrama admitted of many manifestations, encompassing everything from comic operas (like Mozart’s Magic Flute, which alternated singing with spoken dialogue) to experimental symphonic works (in which a narrator’s declaimed monologue was emotionally painted by the accompanying orchestra). Melodrama in this musical sense persisted through to the twentieth century, and included notable works such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. But slowly melodrama as a term began to take on connotations relating to one of comic opera’s central conceits: hyperbole and exaggeration. Melodrama became synonymous with comic excesses of emotional portrayal. Eventually, during the twentieth century, this meaning fastened onto a constellation of generic implications within the domain of film (think, for example, of Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce). In its afterlife during the twenty-first century, melodrama has sometimes been used pejoratively: it can be employed as an epithet to disqualify the performance of emotion as inappropriately intense, or to designate emotion connected to an ostensibly inappropriate subject. But even in this new sense, melodrama retains an element of its early history insofar as it can be appropriated within subcultures in order to comically mock the traditions of mass culture. This course examines the long history of melodramatic art forms from the eighteenth century through to the present day. Together we will perform close readings of the objects within this rich tradition, supplemented by readings in queer theory, critical theory, and performance studies.