Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0270 - Composing with Poetry

This "comprovisation" course will look to the inspiration of the poetic for our creative work. What a huge subject! Here are our limitations. We will do a series of composition assignments where we each set the same poetic text, but with diverse musical languages. We will be studying how masterful composer/improvisers, from Franz Schubert to Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell to George Crumb, and many more, have set and interacted with words. We will work on the technical challenges and possibilities of writing for the voice. We will compose for the instruments in our class, and for our voices. We will work on in-the-moment improvisation with words and music. We each will aim to engage a complexity of musical styles, and of cultural lineages, using a range of notational and improvisational methodologies. We will write some settings as songs, but we will not be using our own lyrics. (In this regard, this course will differ from a songwriting class.) We will have the opportunity to write a work for guest professional singer(s) with both Afro-American and Euro-American, classical and jazz performance practices.

Independent Work Student are expected to spend 6-8 hours of preparation and work outside of class time. Prerequisites: This is an upper 200 course where your music theory, music performance, and music composition/improvisation skills will be called upon.