Music

This course offers singers and non-singers alike the opportunity to share in the rich experience of singing as a community activity, whilst developing a deeper insight into how pop music is performed and what makes it powerful in our society. It looks at socio-political and historical overviews of significant pop artists from 1950s to present day, offering a cultural perspective on their unique musical and vocal characteristics. Through practice-based tutorials, students will apply the concepts explored in lectures and along with an introduction to basic music theory and will learn to sing well-known pop songs in a group setting. 

This course aims to give a broad outline of several Japanese musical genres, along with an understanding of the way in which the musical styles exist within Japanese culture. Emphasis will also be placed on the cultural and geographical position of Japan within the larger context of East Asia. The course takes a practical approach, with frequent demonstrations, providing an opportunity to try out several Japanese instruments. No musical or linguistic skills are needed to take the course.

Learning goals:  

1) To obtain an overview of musical traditions in Japan; 
2) To develop ways of describing these musical traditions and understanding them in their cultural context, and
3) To relate these traditions to Western European and other Asian musical traditions.

This course is a survey of the history and aesthetics of film music from the late 1890s to the present day. It covers the dramatic function of music as an element of cinematic narrative, the codification of musical iconography in cinematic genres, the symbolic use of pre-existing music, and the evolving musical styles of film composers.

The aim of this course is to help the students acquire an understanding of the materials and common practice of European music. It provides knowledge of music theory and the physics of sound, including notation, tonality, modalities, scales, rhythms, intervals, triads and various musical terms.  Music is like a language, so students are expected to practice it repeatedly to master its rules. By doing so, students will be able to make the basis for more advanced learning, such as chords practice, music analysis and arrangement. This course also examines European thought and science related to the principles of music theory.

This course allows students to explore sound-based interaction methods in the context of new music, live performance, sound installation, and design by looking at creative approaches to using computers and code. Lectures cover a range of areas based on the development of interactive software systems for manipulating, sampling and synthesizing sound in real-time. Students investigate these aspects and apply them through coding their own projects in relation to areas such as interactive sound design, digital musical instrument design, data sonification, sound therapy, algorithmic composition, and audio- visual installation and performance. Projects are developed using an accessible software programming language such as Max.

This course traces the blues from its birth in the late 19th century to the present day. Sweeping through America in the early 1910s, the genre was a pervasive influence on the popular mainstream until the 1970s and continues to be played and heard today. The course draws on social history, cultural studies, and musicology. Topics include the blues’ musical characteristics, its verbal lexicon, its performance standards, its ties with African-American culture, and its intersection with other popular music genres. Alongside a historical approach, lectures also consider some of the blues’ regional variants (Chicago, Mississippi, Memphis), along with its most significant artists, such as pre-eminent pre-war performers like Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith, stars of the electric era like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the genre’s most notable acolytes in the 60s and beyond.

Opera is derived from the Latin word 'Opus,' which has been developed in Italy in the past 400 years. This course outlines the history of Opera and traces how it developed; the goal of the course is to differentiate and understand between what is music and what is opera. In addition, students will be introduced to different cultures between western opera based on the Belcanto method and its oriental traditional arts.