Music

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.

This course provides a study of the lives, society, culture, and history of modern composers through a medium called film. Composers discussed include Mahler and Shostakovich, Debussy, George Gershine, Penderetsky, Riggety. The course also examines the influence of modern society on works of art and changes in musical dialect.

This course provides students with both a thorough introduction and an experiential immersion in the music of Ireland, and encompasses all its richness and variety. No previous knowledge of Irish musical history is required and neither is it necessary to be able to read musical notation. The course engages with the music of Ireland from the medieval period to the present day and encompasses three principal types of music – traditional, classical, and popular. The music of Ireland is examined in its historical context and is situated within the wider international context. The music's historical, social, cultural, and political dimensions are discussed.

This course offers students the opportunity to consider the ways in which the arts, and specifically music, can play a part in relation to the challenges we face in contemporary society, including climate change, mass migration, civil unrest, social exclusion, and navigating power relations. Students explore ways in which citizens can engage in the arts to engender social change. They question whether artists have an obligation to serve communities and how they might do this. Students are guided from engagement with theoretical concepts, multidisciplinary literature, and real-world examples (in the lectures), through action, creation and communication (the in-person music creation sessions and the group assignment), to reflection (the individual assignment).

This course presents the study of intermediate piano repertoire and application of harmony at the keyboard. Students learn various important keyboard skills and techniques that enhance their understanding of and experience in making music. Such skills include harmonization, transposition, figured bass, improvisation, piano techniques, score reading, musical interpretation, solo and ensemble playing.

Musical instruments are central to all forms of music. This course introduces the study of instruments, introducing methods and methodologies that can be used to inform ongoing studies across the music curriculum. Through considering instruments from around the world as socially and musically located craft objects that are tools for music making, a decolonized approach is central to the ethos behind this course. The course touches on the history of instruments; the history of studying instruments; how instruments are made, preserved and used; the meanings that instruments gain through association; and the materials available to makers in different contexts. The course is grounded in the University's Musical Instrument Collection.

The content of the course is a cultural history of popular music from 1900 to modern times. This course examines the social and political conditions that influenced the development of genres in popular music by evaluating key releases from influential artists. Students analyze the growth of popular music from the turn of the 20th century onwards. They study the development of successive genres from delta blues and early jazz onwards, exploring the dynamic relationship between popular music, popular culture, and social change. The course also provides an introduction to critical approaches to culture and popular music such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, and Marxian analysis.