Music

This course explores the evolution of the Great American Songbook, a loosely defined canon of influential American popular songs from the early 20th century. These songs, many originating from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, have shaped the foundation of American popular music. Students examine the craft of songwriting, the business of music publishing, and the cultural contexts that influenced the work of composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. Through musical and lyrical analysis, historical inquiry, and engagement with primary sources, students develop a critical understanding of the enduring legacy of these songs and their impact on jazz, musical theatre, and contemporary popular music.

This course introduces students to a variety of methods to interpret, analyze, and understand popular music and its impact on society. Each week focuses on a selected genre or thread in modern popular music, from rock and roll to hip-hop to underground and dance music. By examining these genres and threads, students are encouraged to use theoretical frameworks that help reveal the cultural and musical significance of the chosen examples. These frameworks include media theory, gender and performativity, and the critical examination of race and identity. It also focuses more broadly on how popular music propagates itself over time via its relationship to technology, cultural and subcultural movements, and political currents. Although the course does introduce and employ a few musical-analytical concepts, it is an elective course and has no prerequisites.

The Elective Musical Practice Workshop is a practical course focused on the experience of the student in the fields of musical creation and interpretation, recognizing and developing stylistic elements that allow an analytical position and criticism.

This course is tailored for beginners in music appreciation and enhances interest and appreciation for classical music. It provides basic academic knowledge of music and encourages the development of personal aesthetic taste, deeper emotional awareness, and cultivation of artistic temperament.

This course examines the relationship between words and music, discussing ways in which language and music can interact, and the different ways in which words and music may construct meaning. Examples are drawn primarily from Western art music. No prior knowledge of musical notation is necessary to take this course. Students should, however, expect to learn and use appropriate terms and concepts to describe and analyze set works. The syllabus draws on works composed in different cultural contexts to illustrate both short and longer sung musical genres, including some excerpts of longer, dramatic works. This course is intended to be of particular interest to students of English and other modern languages, but is open to all with an interest in music and lyrics.

This course explores a major topic in current music research, locates it in intellectual and disciplinary history, and gives students the opportunity to conduct independent research on or around the topic, which usually arises from a current project in the department. 

How do musicians achieve and maintain their health? This course explores the science of music, health, and wellbeing through the study of health promotion, a range of health issues (including mental health), and practical strategies for incorporating healthy lifestyles into everyday life. It examines longstanding debates in both scholarly and practice-based fields of music and health. Topics include mindfulness, music psychology, Alexander Technique, yoga, tai chi, performance science, growth mindset programs, music therapy, mental health, workplace safety, and physiotherapy.

This course presents a history of music in film by examining the development of key trends and significant composers from the "silent" era to the present day. It considers the place of music, and the soundtrack more generally, in the film production process and in terms of the relationship between composer and director. A focus on Hollywood, with its proclivity for bespoke orchestral scores, are supplemented by investigating a range of other styles (e.g. pop, jazz, electronica) and international (primarily European) examples. It provides an overview of the field while alighting upon case studies, for which fundamental theoretical concepts are introduced. Major mainstream film composers are featured alongside more experimental recent practitioners and composers better known for their work in the concert hall.

This course provides an in-depth critical introduction to a range of important concepts, musical works, institutions, and people in music of a given time period, and explores both their impact on musical culture and their relationship to wider political, social, and artistic issues. Topics may vary by year.

This course takes the development of classical Western music history as the main axis, with special emphasis on the role and influence of composers in the changes of different eras. The course explores the hymns of the Middle Ages, through the polyphonic art of the Renaissance, the splendor and order of the Baroque, the balanced structure of the classical period and the soulful expression of the romantic period, to the opportunity music, spectrum music, electronic music and cross-disciplinary creations of the 20th and 21st centuries. Through the works and life stories of representative composers of each era, the class analyzes how music responds to and shapes culture, thought, and social trends. Classes combine listening experience, film viewing, and interactive discussions to cultivate students' artistic perception and critical thinking.