How do we hear when we compose? How can we hear more? Improvisation and musical notation are tools we use in generating and extending our ideas and feelings. We will compose music each week, using a progression of compositional prompts that we workshop in class. This work will lead to a multi-sectional final composition. Our focus will be on both through- composed, fully notated works, and works that involve improvisation in their structure. Each student will present an in-class study of an individual work or creative artist, with a set of compositional questions as a guide.

In recent years yoga, has achieved unprecedented popularity in American culture as witnessed by the countless yoga classes, institutes, and clinics springing up around the country. Yet to a large degree, the "yoga" encountered in such venues reflects but one aspect of the classical system of yoga - namely, physical postures - and neglects other crucial features of a complex 3,000 year-old tradition that has manifested itself variously over the centuries in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain communities.

Sketchbooks are places of safety and freedom, where artists can do whatever they please: explore unproven paths, go against the grain, experiment with unfamiliar techniques, document the world in deeply personal ways or just doodle without any pressure that out of this engagement a masterpiece will be born... and yet from working in sketchbooks regularly artists develop a discipline of engaging with their artistic practice and from the lack of pressure often new directions, new bodies of work may be born.

In Greek, the term "Ekphrasis" means "to describe, to point out, to explain" and is associated with the desire to turn that which is visual into words. How do text and image reflect and depend on each other? For centuries, these two modes of representation have enjoyed fruitful yet difficult paths of communication and mutual questioning/interrogation. This course will touch on various issues that emerge from the rhetorical collaboration between text and image. Beginning with G.E.

This course will explore how narratives live and die; how society can endanger them and bring them to fruition; how various environments, social and natural, influence production of language and narrative. Among these environments, we will look at writing in and about prison, concentration camps and environmental disaster, with special attention dedicated to the topics of censorship and language death, which we will treat as political and social environments of their own kind. We will ask questions like: (1) Why are narratives censored and why are so many languages dying?

This intermediate level production course places the interview as the locus of inquiry in order to explore, respond to, express, the ways in which social issues such as racism, economic inequality, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, bullying, hate speech and hate crimes, disability, incarceration, to name a few, affect us. In Interview Practices, Dialogue and Conversation in Studio Video Production, students create, research and analyze the process of producing scripted, story-based, socially engaged, short non-fiction and experimental videos.

This course is for students with the solid knowledge of Western music fundamentals including the proficiency with notation, intervals and chords identification as well as basic melodic and rhythmic sight-reading skills. The class explores a musical language that has been extremely influential in the shaping of Western musical cultures, particularly focusing on its formative periods. Studying four-part diatonic harmony and voice-leading techniques, we examine organizational principles of music and underlying sonic sensibilities with this particular music.

With the ascendency of today's smartphone technologies, the quality and reliability of the photographed image and recorded sound is equal to if not superior to many DSLR cameras. This course will provide an opportunity for students to make a variety of films in the dramatic narrative, documentary, or experimental traditions primarily utilizing their smartphones or in combination with related analogue and digital technologies.

This course focuses on twentieth century African popular music; it examines musical genres from different parts of the continent, investigating their relationships to the historical, political and social dynamics of their respective national and regional origins. Regional examples like highlife, soukous, kwaito and afro-beat will be studied to assess the significance of popular music as a creative response to social and political developments in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

This course examines contemporary Japanese popular culture as a way of understanding cultural dimensions of globalization and its complex operation, which transcends traditional national boundaries. Narrowly defined, J-Pop refers to a genre of music that has dominated Japan's music scene since the early1990s. In this course we extend our investigation to include various other media, forms, and expressions of popular culture related to our interest, e.g., manga, anime, films, computer games, and distinctive fashions.