Music Course Descriptions
Music 101
- Private Instruction
Variable credit: either one-half course or zero credit for one
semester. Individual instrumental or vocal instruction. Students
taking this course for credit are encouraged to participate in at
least one student recital. See above for pre- or corequisite for
credit.
Music 103
- Reed Chamber Orchestra
Variable credit: either one-half course or zero credit for one
semester. Availability of credit dependent on instruments needed
for repertoire to be performed in any given semester. This course
is comprised of rehearsal and performance of orchestral works from
the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. The orchestra usually
performs a concert in the Kaul Auditorium each semester. See above
for pre- or corequisite for credit.
Music 105
- Reed Chorus
Variable credit: either one-half course or zero credit for one
semester. This course is comprised of rehearsal and performance of
choral works from all periods of music. See above for pre- or
corequisite for credit.
Music 107
- Collegium Musicum
Variable credit: either one-half course or zero credit for one
semester. This course is comprised of rehearsal and performance of
vocal music suitable for performance by a small group. Audition
required. See above for pre- or corequisite for credit.
Music 109
- Chamber Music
Variable credit; either one-half course or zero credit for one
semester. Available by audition when there are enough advanced
students to form an ensemble of one player per part. This course is
comprised of weekly coaching sessions and the chance to perform
during the semester. Prerequisite: audition. Corequisite:
participation in the Reed Chamber Orchestra (except for keyboard
players). See above for additional pre- or corequisite for credit.
Music 110
- Introduction to Music Listening
Full course for one semester. This course aims to enhance pleasure
and understanding of music and to broaden the range of responses to
it through active listening. We shall develop a vocabulary for
talking and writing about music and learn to identify musical
structures that have endured in the European West. Examples are
drawn from a wide range of musical styles and historical periods.
The relationship between musical structure and expressive power
will be a primary focus. Lecture-conference.
Music 111
- Theory I
Full course for one semester. This course examines notation of
pitch and rhythm; scales and key signatures; intervals, triads, and
diatonic seventh chords; writing in four parts. It begins with the
basic elements of music, but moves swiftly through the contents of
a first-semester college-level music theory course. Labs include
sight singing, dictation, and keyboard. Lecture and laboratory.
Music 112
- Theory II: Intermediate Harmony and Species Counterpoint
Full course for one semester. This course continues the laboratory
skills acquired in Music 111. Students are introduced to principles
of melodic construction, modal counterpoint, and more advanced
tonal harmony, applying these principles to appropriate musical
examples. Prerequisite: Music 111 or equivalent skill, to be
determined by a placement examination given at the beginning of the
academic year. Lecture-conference and laboratory.
Music 122
- Historical Survey of Western Music
Full course for one semester. Beginning with Gregorian chant--the
music of the medieval Roman Catholic liturgy--we will explore the
development of chant-based polyphony, the rise of secular genres
alongside church music in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the
new importance of instrumental music and the origins and progress
of opera in the Baroque and Classic eras, and changes in audience
and patronage that have influenced musical developments in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lecture-conference.
Music 212
- Theory III: Baroque Counterpoint
Full course for one semester. This course is a study of the
compositional techniques of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries including recitative, basso continuo, ground bass,
invention, variation, and fugue. Class work will consist of
compositional exercises, ear-training and score-reading, and
analysis of music by Monteverdi, Schütz, Purcell, Corelli, Handel,
and Bach. Prerequisite: Theory II and rudimentary keyboard skills.
Conference with musicianship lab.
Music 232
- Piano Music
Full course for one semester. This course is a study of the piano
as social instrument--drawing-room furniture, icon of
respectability--as well as important expressive medium for
composers, beginning with the keyboard works of J.S. Bach and his
sons; to the high classical composers Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven;
to the nineteenth century "characteristic" pieces of Schumann,
Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms; and the twentieth century timbral
explorations of Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, and Messiaen. Prerequisite:
ability to read piano music. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Music 234
- Symphony
Full course for one semester. This course will introduce works by
Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Mahler, Shostakovich,
Corigliano, and others. Readings will include contemporary and more
recent descriptions and criticism, and discussion will focus mainly
on the music, but also on such issues as changes in the role of the
composer and the character and expectations of the audience.
Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered
2005-06.
Music 238
- Choral Music
Full course for one semester. This course will explore works for
chorus from the Middle Ages to the present day, including Gregorian
chant, masses and motets, liturgical and non-liturgical Requiems,
Passions, and oratorios. Although the emphasis will be on sacred
music, secular works, especially those written in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, will also be considered. Prerequisite:
sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Music 241
- Gender in Music
Full course for one semester. This course is a study of recent
struggles to develop a discourse about music that goes beyond the
formalist view that music is incapable of communicating cultural
values. We shall consider some alternative views: that music
conveys character, that its codes reveal masculine and feminine
traits, and that it functions as sexual metaphor. We shall also
consider music explicitly gendered through its text or performer,
or through tensions between the two such as the castrato tradition.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Music 242
- Opera
Full course for one semester. We will study the way opera marshals
myth, history, and literature to portray action and emotion writ
large. We will explore the multiple meanings that opera creates
from references to earlier opera, to contemporary issues, and to
timeless subjects through examples such as the Orpheus myth
reworked by Monteverdi, Gluck, and Offenbach’s nineteenth-century
satire; the political conflicts portrayed in Mozartian opera and in
John Adams's Nixon in China; and the eroticism of death
explored in Bizet’s Carmen and Wagner’s Tristan and
Parsifal. Conference.
Music 244
- Song
Full course for one semester. This course is a survey of European
art song from the late Renaissance to the present, with a focus on
the historical milieu, the texts, and the specific ways in which
the genre's principal composers set those texts. Primary emphasis
will be on nineteenth century German Lieder; other types of
solo songs considered will include English lute song, seventeenth
century cantatas, and solo song in the twentieth century.
Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Lecture-conference.
Music 246
- Mozart
Full course for one semester. Survey of representative works from
his symphonies, chamber music, piano concerti, and operas. We will
consider the roles of Enlightenment ideals, irony and humor in
Mozart’s works and also examine the social settings of classical
music, particularly the rise of public concerts. Conference.
Music 248
- Music and Religion
Full course for one semester. Does sacred music differ musically
from secular? What is the role of music in the religious service?
What kinds of religious feeling does music convey? This course will
study selected sacred music traditions, primarily Western, inspired
by religious beliefs and spiritual feeling. Prerequisite: sophomore
standing. Lecture-conference.
Music 251
- Musical Aesthetics
Full course for one semester. Music’s power to represent, imitate,
depict, and narrate will be explored through musical examples and
writings about music from the Greeks to the present. Topics will
include the Greek notion of ethos, music in the medieval cosmos,
musical mimesis in the Renaissance, the Baroque "Accents of
Passion," Enlightenment views of imitation and expression, and the
Romantics’ controversy over instrumental music’s power to express
extramusical ideas. Musical examples will be supplemented by
readings in both contemporary and recent philosophical criticism.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Music 256
- Romantic Music
Full course for one semester. This course is a survey of European
art music during the nineteenth century, with a focus on the
historical context and on listening to works in a variety of genres
by many of the principal composers of the era, including Schubert,
Berlioz, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Mussorgsky,
Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and Dvorák. Lecture-conference. Not offered
2005-06.
Music 258
- Beethoven
Full course for one semester. This course is a survey of
Beethoven’s works in historical context, with analysis of important
compositions in the principal genres of sonata, symphony, and
string quartet. Principal biographical events and influence on
later composers will also be a significant focus of this course.
Lecture-conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Music 261
- Composition
Full course for one semester. This course is an introduction to
contemporary composition. Students will compose and perform short
works. The course will deal with problems of instrumentation,
notation, and performance, as well as the larger aesthetic issues
of coherence and gesture, within a broad range of styles and media.
Prerequisite: Music 212 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
Music 264
- Modernism
Full course for one semester. This course is an introduction to the
music of Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Stravinsky,
Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartók, Hindemith, Weill, Prokofiev,
Shostakovich, Ives, Varèse, Crawford, Gershwin, and Copland. We
will approach this music from the perspective of modernist
aesthetic theory. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Music 266
- The Music of Duke Ellington
Full course for one semester. As composer, arranger, songwriter,
bandleader, and pianist, Duke Ellington (1899–1974) stood at the
center of American music. His works mirror the development of jazz
from ragtime, to hot jazz, swing, bebop, and beyond. We will trace
the development of Ellington’s style, the evolution of his
orchestra and the influence of its players on his music, and his
collaboration with Billy Strayhorn. We will also examine
Ellington’s exploration of different genres, including extended
jazz compositions, musical theater, and religious music.
Lecture-conference.
Music 268
- Bebop
Full course for one semester. In the late 1930s and the 1940s jazz
underwent a stylistic revolution that altered its idiom, format,
and social function. We will study the music of the leading figures
of this bebop movement: Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy
Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke,
and Miles Davis, and investigate the sources of bebop in earlier
jazz and its influence on the course of jazz history.
Lecture-conference. Not offered 2005-2006.
Music 272
- Music since 1968
Full course for one semester. We will study representative works of
late modernism, avant-garde music, minimalism and post-modernism by
Elliott Carter, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György
Ligeti, Witold Lutoslawski, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich,
Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, George Crumb, Arvo Pärt and Alfred
Schnittke. Lecture-conference.
Music 311
- Medieval and Renaissance Music
Full course for one semester. This course is a study of the origins
and development of a specifically Western tradition of musical
thought from its liturgical function in the early Christian church
to the sacred and secular works of both Franco-Flemish composers
(Dufay, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin) and Italian composers
(Marenzio, Gesualdo, Palestrina, Lassus, Monteverdi) in the
sixteenth century. We will look in close detail at the development
of notation, transcription, performance practice, and principles of
editing. Prerequisite: ability to read music. Conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
Music 343
- Form and Analysis
Full course for one semester. This course is a study of the forms
of the Classical and Romantic periods and an introduction to the
analytic ideas of Schenker, Reti and Schoenberg. Prerequisite Music
212. Conference. Not offered 2005-2006.
Music 470
- Thesis
Full course for one year.
Music 481
- Independent Study
One-half or full course for one semester. Prerequisite: approval of
instructor and division.
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