Composition according to the needs and experience of the individual student. One class meeting per week and private conferences. This course may be repeated.
Requisite: MUSI 269 or the equivalent, and consent of the instructor. Fall semester. Professor Sawyer.
This course will explore compositional techniques that grow out of the various traditions of Western art music. Innovations of twentieth-century composers in generating new approaches to melody and scale, rhythm and meter, harmony, instrumentation, and musical structure will be examined. The course will include improvisation as a source of ideas for written compositions and as a primary compositional mode. Instrumental or vocal competence and good music reading ability are desirable. Assignments will include compositions of various lengths and related analytical projects.
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 223 and EUST 223.) Does music effect social change, and who decides? This third semester of the Music and Culture series will consider these questions through attentive listening to music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and related readings. Our investigation will be organized around three primary areas: Crime and Punishment, Violence and Pacifism, and Race and Gender.
(Offered as MUSI 122 and FAMS 376) Introduction to Music and Film acquaints students with the primary concepts and methods used in contemporary scholarship on film music. Through a combination of readings, in-class discussion, and outside film screenings, students will gain skill in the analysis and interpretation of films with special focus on the contributions of sound to the cinematic experience. In addition, the selection of films for study will familiarize students with a broad range of film genres and styles.
(Offered as MUSI 121 and WAGS 121.) LGBT Perspectives in Popular Music is an introduction to the ways that LGBT people and members of other sexual minorities have participated in popular music as composers, performers, and crucial audiences. In this historical survey of the recorded repertory of (mostly) American popular song, students will acquaint themselves with music in a wide range of vernacular styles and explore the social, political, and aesthetic contexts within which they have appeared.
A course designed to explore jazz harmonic and improvisational practice from both the theoretical and applied standpoint. Students will study common harmonic practices of the jazz idiom, modes and scales, rhythmic practices, the blues, and understand the styles of jazz in relation to the history of the music. An end-of-semester performance of material(s) studied during the semester will be required of the class. A jazz-based ear-training section will be scheduled outside of the regular class times. Two class meetings per week. This course is considered a point of entry to MUSI 241.
FALL SEMESTER DESCRIPTION:
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
The quadratic formula shows us that the roots of a quadratic polynomial possess a certain symmetry. Galois Theory is the study of the corresponding symmetry for higher degree polynomials. We will develop this theory starting from a basic knowledge of groups, rings and fields. One of our main goals will be to prove that there is no general version of the quadratic formula for a polynomial of degree five or more. Along the way, we will also show that a circular cake can be divided into 17 (but not 7) equal slices using only a straight-edged knife.
