Exploring the elements of music-making through analysis, compositions, and performance.

This course will help students identify and understand chords that are commonly used in 12 and 16 bar blues. Early jazz will be studied. We will focus on the following pianists: Earl Hines, Fats Waller, and Lil Harden.

A chronological survey beginning with a summary of Mozart's early work in opera and related genres and centering on a detailed examination of his seven mature operatic masterpieces. For the general student.

Cross-listed: MES

This course in jazz literature is designed for music lovers and readers of literature. This course will focus on the work of Langston Hughes, and the autobiography of Duke Ellington Music is My Mistress.

The conventional wisdom is that minimalism--an idiom of clear, nondecorative lines, repetition, and great tonal simplicity which arose in the 1960s and '70s--was the last identifiable new style in music history. Actually, there has since been an accelerating series of new styles, many of them building on minimalist roots toward greater and world-music-inspired complexity. This course will begin with a quick run-through of minimalist and conceptualist music of the '60s and '70s, but the primary focus will be on postminimalist trend since 1985, and on how today's composers are integrating the multifarious strands of postmodern musical life. We'll study performance art; the mellow yet meticulously structured style known as postminimalism; ambient music; computer music, most of it intuitive and quite human-sounding; the New Romanticism; post-jazz improvisation; virtual audio; "postmodern" collage; artrock symphonies for massed electric guitars; the world-music-influenced, rhythmically complex idiom known in New York as totalism; and much more. In the process, we'll try to figure out whether that seemingly indefinable bugbear modernism is dead. If not, what is it today? If it is, what do we now have instead?

Want to feel your spirit elevated by exposure to the Great Monuments of European Music? Go take some other course. This course will take a critical view of the symphony as a medium, as the composer's answer to the novel. We'll study the social conditions under which the symphony arose, look at its original uses, and listen to early examples by forgotten composers such as Sammartini and Wagenseil. Then we'll ponder the rise of its prestige, its eventual reputation as the noblest of musical genres, exemplified in a line from Haydn through Beethoven to Brahms and Bruckner. We'll sidetrack through the symphony's revealing American detour in works by Amy Beach and George Bristow. Finding the apotheosis of the symphony in Mahler, we'll end with the strangely discontinuous history the form has had in this century, with a few examples by Stravinsky and Webern, culminating at present in Glenn Branca's raucous ten symphonies, eight of them scored for masses of electric guitars. Why did the symphony die--and is it dead? In dissecting the changing characteristics of the form, we'll explore how (and indeed whether) it is possible for absolute instrumental music to engage and manipulate an audience's attention. Along the way, we'll probably listen to a lot of those Great Monuments of European Music, too. No prerequisites, and open to non-music majors.

This course will explore the Romantic Era in terms of its most colorful characteristic: harmony. Works by Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, and Scriabin will be analyzed, and excerpts of larger works by Berlioz, Wagner, and Bruckner - for form and orchestration, but most of all to explore the flowering of ultrachromatic harmonic progressions and modulations. Along with augmented sixth chords, borrowed chords, enharmonic modulations, and chromatic voice-leading, the class will study the wealth of thematic transformation techniques that made late Romanticism such a fluid and often extra musically referential language. This course is intended for music majors, but is open to anyone who has fulfilled the prerequisite, Fundamentals I and II or the equivalent.

This course will examine the virtuoso bassist, bandleader and composer. Starting with his early career in California with Tal Farlow and Red Norvo, it will cover his creation of the Jazz Workshop, a group which enables young composers to have their works performed, and his association with Max Roach and Debut Records. The compositions which put him in the forefront of the avant-garde will be introduced and his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog (1972) will be discussed. Open to nonmusic majors.

Beginning with the radical innovations of such revolutionary figures as Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and Edgar Varèse early in the twentieth century, the experimental-music tradition in the United States and elsewhere will be examined. In addition to studying the body of work this tradition has produced, as well as discussing its aesthetic and philosophic underpinnings, students will be encouraged to actively realize and perform works by the composers and artists studied. Examples of some possible performance projects: Ives's quartertone pieces; Cowell's piano music; graphic scores by Feldman, Brown and Cardew; chance and indeterminate scores by Cage; realization of a Nancarrow player-piano score on Disklavier; event pieces by Fluxus, Paik and Kosugi; meditations piece by Oliveros; phase pieces of Steve Reich; notated and text pieces by Rzewski; game pieces by Wolff and Zorn, etc. This course is expected to be taken as a prerequisite for all Electronic Music Studio courses.