Music

This seminar explores the interface between queer identity, music, and history and investigates how musical spaces may serve as mirrors and critiques of societal norms. Students investigate the experiences of queer artists through a historical perspective and see how they use music as a form of social critique and expression. Beginning with operatic roles in the 17th century, through contexts like the 19th century cakewalk, the cabaret of the Weimar republic in the 1920s-1930s, as well as hip-hop culture, the seminar uncovers how gender transgressivity and performance art are reflected in music. Students analyze queer and transgressive music scenes as “heterotopias” (Foucault) – places of resistance against societal norms – and discuss the role of music in the construction of community and identity. Important texts by Audre Lorde, Michael Foucault, and Theodor W Adorno offer theoretical foundations through which the interventional power of music in the negotiation of identity and difference can be understood. Students develop their own case studies of queer artists and their visual, cultural, musical, and/or social moments of intervention.

The course focuses on learning analytical capacity and aesthetic sensitivity regarding musical interpretation, through the experience of systematically and regularly witnessing live concerts, on dates and places assigned by the course teachers. The classes address the expressive resources linked to the interpretation of music and listening modes, the process of assimilating a work, form, style and musical genre, among others.

This course introduces students to a wide range of spaces and places where music is encountered and used throughout cultures and societies across the globe. It engages with changing ideas and concepts about the role of music in society, in different cultural contexts.

This course provides an in-depth critical introduction to a range of important 20th/21st-century concepts, musical works, institutions and people and explores both their impact on musical culture and their relationship to wider political, social, and artistic issues during the 20th and/or 21st centuries.

This course focuses on expression in the solo keyboard music of C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and Mozart. J.S. Bach and Beethoven will appear as "book ends" to help establish a broader music-historical perspective. The central aim is to develop a refined, historically informed understanding of the musical materials used in keyboard music, encompassing the theory of musical topics, the rhetorical concept of musical form, stylistic registers (from tragic to comic), and notions of character and representation. The course is notes based, but not concerned with structural analysis for its own sake. Instead, the materials and expressive intentions of solo keyboard music are related to period aesthetic ideals, instrument design, music publishing, the rise of the professional solo fortepianist, and­—in the home—the bourgeois ideal of female musical accomplishment. An over-arching theme is the special place of solo keyboard music within the culture of sensibility: in many ways a more productive rubric than that of Viennese Classical Style.

This course provides a firm foundation in aural skills for the 21st Century musician in the globalized Singapore context, drawing in particular on Western Classical music, popular music/jazz, and music from diverse cultures (e.g., Chinese, Malay, Indian). The course introduces to key listening skills to develop a critical ear, aural awareness, and cross-cultural sensitivity to music across different traditions, styles, and genres. Throughout the course, students develop foundational aural skills (e.g., sight-singing/solfege-singing (including using cipher notation), dictation/aural transcription skills, and abilities to identify harmonies, timbres, other musical and stylistic features through a spiral approach. This course requires an audition.

This course examines the history and practice of electronic music from the early twentieth century to the present. It will explore a wide range of genres—from experimental forms like musique concrète and drone composition to popular traditions like rock and various forms of electronic dance music (EDM)—as well as the evolution of instruments, techniques, and lines of influence. Through the course students will develop a broad perspective of the history of the field and an understanding of musical techniques that will meaningfully inform their own listening and creative practices. The primary goal of the course is to establish an understanding of the development of electronic music, including prominent composers, musicians, technologies, instruments, aesthetic ideas, and genres. A secondary goal is linked to the methods and organization of the course as they set out these points of orientation. The course will introduce a wide and representative sampling of different sources for the study of electronic music: in addition to recordings of musical works and performances, these sources include artists’ statements, historical surveys, documentary film, science fiction, specialized musicological study, music criticism, writings on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, and virtual software for modeling analogue synthesis.

This course explores how scholars and practitioners use musical data, both in audio and notated formats. Students are given the opportunity to develop skills in encoding, analyzing, categorizing, and curating music recordings and notated music. These skills are developed by encouraging an intimate understanding of the nature of different musical formats, an appreciation of their uses, and approaches to computational analyses of their electronic manifestations.

This course examines the intersection of music, AI, and creativity, drawing from the rapidly expanding critical scholarship on AI. While the class prioritizes musicological, sociocultural, and philosophical approaches to critiquing AI, it will also engage with other genres of writings from media studies, music information retrieval (MIR), computational creativity, and from within the music industry. 

This course introduces students to a rich variety of often unfamiliar sonic expressions, musics, and contextualized musical case studies that highlight (or question the limits of) music’s relationship with particular physical (or natural) environments. It also introduces students to, and encourage critical engagement with, music specific and interdisciplinary literature relating to the environment, place, landscape, acoustic ecology, and indigeneity.