The course will focus on song as the pre-eminent form of 20th Century musical expression in several different genres and musical traditions. The students will be exposed to a range of techniques for composing songs in a variety of genres and styles: the parallel and reciprocal relationship and development of textual and sonic materials; writing for the amplified voice; prosody and intelligibility of the text in a song setting; addressing a target audience; genre and stylistic convergence in the Internet Age, etc.

Traditional song writing formulas and other musical structures will be examined under the light of psychoacoustic perception and auditory function of the brain and strategies of how art-music composers can apply their advanced compositional skills to achieve similar psychoacoustic results with more unconventional means will be discussed and developed throughout the course.