This course provides instruction in the use of electronic equipment for composition of music. Topics to be considered include approaches to sound synthesis, signal editing and processing, hard disk recording techniques, sequencing audio and MIDI material, and the use of software for interaction between electronics and live performers. The course will also survey the aesthetics and repertory of electroacoustic music. Assignments in the use of equipment and software as well as required listening will prepare students for a final composition project to be performed in a class concert.

In this course we will examine the history of electroacoustic music in tandem with practical composition assignments so that we may explore how class, race, gender, and sexuality are expressed through sound and music technologies. This course introduces soundscape composition, a subset of electroacoustic music, as an artistic practice and research method. Students will use journaling in order to document their individual relationships with music and to reflect on the role sound plays in the formation of personal and community identity.

(Offered as THDA 255, ENGL 223, and MUSI 255) This studio course is designed as an interactive laboratory for dancers, composers, actors, writers/poets, vocalists, and sound artists to work together to create meaningful interactions between sound, movement, and text. Working individually and in collaborative groups, students will create original material in the various media and experiment with multiple ways to craft interesting exchanges and dialogues between word, sound, and movement or to create hybrid forms.

In this class we will explore jazz through transcription, composition, arranging and improvisation. Materials for transcription will range from the classic renditions of jazz standards by Gershwin and Kern to highly complex works by such greats as Wayne Shorter and Charles Mingus. Advanced approaches to improvisation will include the exploration of new source materials including the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns by Nicolas Slonimsky as used by John Coltrane.

A continuation of MUSI 241 and the second of the required music theory sequence for majors. In this course we will study different manifestations of formal principles, along with the relationship of form to harmony and tonality. We will start with pre-tonal music (through works by keyboard and vocal composers like Orlando Gibbons and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck), leading to a focus on the understanding of musical form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

How does music’s harmonic language work? What principles influence harmonic choices in different styles of music, and what do Bach chorales, Adele’s music, and Broadway showtunes have in common? How do composers and musicians manage the intricate relationship between harmony and melody? In this class, we’ll develop a deeper understanding of conventions of tonal harmony in music from popular and classical traditions, among others.

(Offered as MUSI 226 and BLST 234 [US])  One of two courses that trace the development of jazz from its emergence in early 20th-century New Orleans to its profound impact on American culture. This course examines its early roots in late 19th-century American popular culture and its role as American popular music in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.

(Offered as MUSI 225 and FAMS 375) Jazz occupies a special role in the development of American film. From The Jazz Singer (1927), the first American film that included synchronized sound, to the sprawling Jazz: A Documentary (2001) from Ken Burns, filmic representations of jazz speak to fundamental ways that Americans negotiate difference and imagine national identity. This course examines the relationship between jazz and American culture through three modalities: improvisation, narrativity, and representation.

(Offered as MUSI 222 and EUST 222) One of three courses in which the development of Western music is studied in its cultural-historical context. Occasionally we will attend concerts in Amherst and elsewhere. Composers to be studied include Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, Mussorgsky, and Brahms. Regular listening assignments will broaden the repertoire we encounter and include a wide sampling of Classical and Romantic music.

Singing together offers one of the most powerful human experiences, especially when combined with a deep emotional connection to a particular event or setting. Written choral music comprises one of the oldest and largest repertoires of music in the world, and this course will explore vocal offerings by composers across the span of the past 800 years. Repertoire studied will include traditional composers ranging from Byrd, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Britten, to modern-day interpretations of choral music offered by Moses Hogan, Caroline Shaw and Roomful of Teeth.