Music

This course provides basic understanding of piano and the playing skills of piano, including: staccato, legato, skipping, scales and voices, chords.

This course examines the ways of thinking, talking and writing about music.

Korea began to adopt Western culture in the nineteenth century and developed their own hybridized music culture into the twentieth-first century. This class examines contemporary Korean musical culture alongside the history of Korea and explores Korean music culture as a global phenomenon. The course covers Korean aesthetic and sensibility in Korean musical culture with select examples from Korean traditional music, Korean’s children music, Korean arts songs of the Colonial Korea period, popular music (K-pop), Korean drama music, Korean film music, and K-classical music.

The course helps students build their compositional skills and contextualize various theoretical concepts through analytical exercises and stylistic writing. Students explore a variety of musical pieces throughout the course to develop their skills for analysis of common practice European music. Through close listening and analysis, students learn about the use of melodic motives, repetition, variation, and harmonic progressions to write their own simple compositions. While prior experience with music composition is not required, a familiarity with music theory rudiments is highly recommended.

The course examines popular music, not as isolated artistic texts, but situated within a wider context. The course is organized around the historical survey of popular music in modern Korea. It looks at and listens to a variety of musical genres and styles that emerged and developed in modern Korea from yuhaengga in the colonial era up until k-pop today, by situating them within a wider socio-cultural, political-economic context, as well as in relation to global musical trends.