Music

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.