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 (Lassus) focus on the understanding of musical form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Topics to be covered will include minuet, variation, sonata form, the romantic character piece and eighteenth-century counterpoint. There will be analyses and writing exercises, as well as model compositions and analytic papers.
Basic principles of harmonic and contrapuntal technique. Emphasis will be on the acquisition of writing skills. This course is the first of the required music theory sequence for majors. Three hours of lecture and two ear-training sections per week.
(Offered as MUSI 221 and EUST 221.) One of three courses in which music is studied in relation to issues of history, theory, culture, and performance, with the focus of the course changing from year to year. This course is an introduction to European music in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras. We will begin by singing Gregorian chant and will go on to cover such topics as the music of the Troubadours, the polyphonic style associated with Notre Dame, the development of musical notation, Renaissance sacred polyphony, madrigals, court dances, and the birth of opera.
(Offered as MUSI 124 and FAMS 310.) This course explores the global scale of much music-making and musical consumption today. Migration, diaspora, war, tourism, postsocialist and postcolonial change, commerce, and digital technology have all profoundly reshaped the way musics are created, circulated, and consumed.
Through analysis, performance, and composition, we will build a solid working understanding of basic principles of melody and harmony common in Western musical traditions. Assignments will include writing short melodies and accompaniments as well as more detailed compositional and improvisational projects. We will use our instruments and voices to bring musical examples to life in the classroom. Two class meetings and one lab session per week.
FALL SEMESTER DESCRIPTION:
This course will introduce students to important concepts in effective academic writing by thinking about and thinking "through" popular music. Our complex relationships to popular music provide a rich theoretical landscape of social, cultural, and political issues. How do we use music to construct, maintain, or challenge private and public identities? How have race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationalism been activated through popular music? What is the role of music in our everyday lives? How do commercial interests influence the music that we listen to?
"Numbers rule the world," many scholars agree. That is, they have become “the dominant form of acceptable evidence in most areas of public life.” We will examine these claims and their implications by asking several questions: How did numbers come to rule? What kinds of numbers? Where do numbers rule and where don't they? What differences do they make? How are the numbers and scientific claims we encounter created? How do they change as they travel from their original scientific context into everyday life?
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
