This course engages global music theories from the perspective of ethnomusicology and analytic approaches drawn from sound studies. The music we analyze will come from popular, folk, and classical traditions around the world, including West African drumming, Caribbean dance genres, East Asian court and religious traditions, American roots music, classical traditions from the Arab world and Indian subcontinent, and several global popular styles.
As musicians, we sometimes forget how powerful harmony is. We casually drop the term in conversation. We think of it as common knowledge. Well, in a way, it is. Emerging in the 17th century in Western Europe and eventually spreading to many places around the world, this musical system has come to play a tremendous role in our perception of musical structure and our emotional experience as listeners.We find harmony in concert halls, coliseums, and coffeehouses, jazz clubs, movie theaters, and mosh pits.
This is a beginner-level course designed to explore jazz harmony and improvisation from theoretical and applied standpoints. Students will study common harmonic practices, modes and scales, rhythmic practices, and the blues, and will learn the historical contexts in which these practices have developed. An end-of-semester performance of material studied during the semester will be required alongside regular individual meetings with the instructor. A one-hour ear training section will be scheduled outside of regular class meetings. Two class meetings and one ear training section per week.
Through composition, analysis, listening practice, and performance, we will build a solid working understanding of many principles of music common in Western musical traditions. The course aims to develop comfort and dexterity in engaging with music via listening, analysis, and creative work. Assignments include harmonizing melodies, writing short melodies and accompaniments, creative representation and listening projects, and annotated analysis. On several occasions we will use our instruments and voices to bring musical examples to life in the classroom and online.
This course is intended for students with little or no background in music who would like to develop a theoretical and practical understanding of how music works. Students will be introduced to the technical details of music such as musical notation, intervals, basic harmony, meter and rhythm. Familiarity with basic music theory will enable students to read and perform at sight as well as provide an introduction to the composition of melodies with chordal accompaniment. The music we analyze and perform will draw from folk, popular, and concert traditions.
In this class we will study the history of the symphony orchestra from its origins in seventeenth-century Europe to the virtuosic ensembles found in many of the world's great cities today. At the heart of our exploration of these groups will be understanding the development of their repertoire by tracing the history of the major genres of orchestral music: symphony, overture, symphonic poem, and concerto. In addition to studying long-canonized musical figures (e.g.
In 1936 the official Soviet newspaper Pravda denounced Dmitri Shostakovich’s latest opera as “muddle instead of music.” In 1942 the Party used his “Leningrad” Symphony as propaganda in the Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany. Shostakovich’s career demonstrates both the unlimited government support and the unlimited control totalitarian states exercise over their artists. This course explores musical life under totalitarian regimes: the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the GDR, Socialist Hungary, China at the time of the Cultural Revolution, and North Korea.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Commutative algebra is known as the study of commutative rings and their ideals and modules. Besides being an important branch of algebra for its own sake, commutative algebra has strong ties to other areas, such as algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory, as it provides essential tools for them. This course is an introductory course in commutative algebra. We will explore more about rings (especially polynomial rings) and ideals, which are taught in Math 350. We will also introduce another important algebraic structure, namely modules over rings.
(Offered as STAT 360 and MATH 360) This course explores the nature of probability and its use in modeling real world phenomena. There are two explicit complementary goals: to explore probability theory and its use in applied settings, and to learn parallel analytic and empirical problem-solving skills. The course begins with the development of an intuitive feel for probabilistic thinking, based on the simple yet subtle idea of counting. It then evolves toward the rigorous study of discrete and continuous probability spaces, independence, conditional probability, expectation, and variance.
