An exploration of selected historical and modern concepts and techniques from the global visual arts and an attempt to "translate" them into music composition. The encounter with the arts will also inform the process of creativity: to simulate the mechanism of a typical pre-modern art workshop, seminar participants will compose in-class, while witnessing each other's progress in real time, working either in parallel (by completing the same tasks simultaneously), or in succession (by adding consecutive layers to one particular task).

This course will follow on from the work done in a basic orchestration course. It is intended to bridge the gap between the fundamentals of instrumentation and advanced orchestration. The course will begin with basic score reading, including transposition. Repertoire for analysis will be drawn from orchestral, wind ensemble, and choral/vocal/orchestral music from the Classical Era to the present day. Scores will be analyzed for instrumental combinations, as well as for idiomatic writing for instruments and instrumental groups. Notation and performance problems will be examined.

A study of orchestration techniques by major twentieth-century composers.

This course follows on the work done in Score Analysis MUS3203H. Orchestral scores studied will be drawn from the 1950s to the present day. Scores will be analyzed for compositional style, as well as for idiomatic writing for instruments and instrumental groups. Notation and performance problems will be examined.

With minor exceptions, rhythm in music is one of the commonalities in almost every musical tradition around the world and, as such, it can transcend individual traditions, colonial or otherwise. In a creative era, such as ours which is dominated by a fascination for complexity, the understanding between cognitively ordered complexity and conceptual (or notational) complexity that is often audibly cognized as unstructured "noise" is a crucial understanding for composers who wish to create and master music that can function as communication between composer and listeners and as a language which can be shared among creators and listeners. The universality of rhythm in world music, can be approached as a deeper cognitive process that transcends but does not betray polyglot cultural practices. The idea of "rhythm" will be expanded to include "harmonic rhythm," "fractal rhythm," "phasing," etc. This course will be useful to graduate and undergraduate composers but also to percussionists who increasingly find themselves acting as composers during their performing careers.

The course will discuss some of the last century's representative operas, from Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande of 1902 to Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin of 2000, and also some of the lesser known but equally masterful exponents of the genre, such as Szymanowski's King Roger of 1926, Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero of 1941, and Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise of 1983. Balancing historical and theoretical approaches, the course will aim at elucidating the ambivalent role of one of Western music's defining genres during a tradition-defying period.

This course examines the practical demands of composing and performing contemporary chamber music. The course will begin with the analysis of several existing chamber works. Instrumental techniques will be demonstrated by performers, and the students will be required to do practical studies for available combinations. The students will create a work for the full ensemble, which will be performed and criticized while in progress. Students will be required to take part in the performance of these works in class. The course concludes with dedicated rehearsal time and a final concert.

Composers, inventors, and artists have experimented with novel acoustic technologies throughout history. In the early twentieth century, composers have devised a variety of ways to build new instruments, from exploring tuning systems and timbre to composing for automatic musical machines. This course examines how composers have utilized acoustic devices and other tools to make entirely new paths of expression in writing electroacoustic works, mixed medium works, and even purely acoustic works since the early twentieth century. This course also takes a close look at the ideologies, aesthetics, and music techniques influenced by technological advancement and considers their cultural and social grounding.

The course will examine the writings on the ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics of music by composer-philosophers and philosopher-composers. Beyond the study of the composers' published books and articles, we will also reference their public lectures, media interviews, private notes, and letters. Studied figures may include al-Kindi, Boethius, Peter Abelard, Hildegard von Bingen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ETA Hoffman, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lalon Fakir, Ferruccio Busoni, Rabindranath Tagore, Theodore Adorno, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, Witold Lutosławski, Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen and George Lewis.

This graduate seminar examines the burgeoning multidisciplinary fields of timbre and orchestration studies. Throughout the seminar, we survey theoretical, analytical, historical, cultural, perceptual, and material orientations to timbre, the practice and study of orchestration, and the interpretation of orchestral music. Sample topics include: Theorizing Orchestral Sonority and Texture, Perceptual Considerations, Global Approaches to Orchestration, Analytical Techniques, Timbre Semantics, Orchestration Treatises, and Ecologies of Production. Course requirements center around short reviews and weekly discussions of readings and musical works, culminating in an independent research project that each student will design in consultation with the instructor. As multidisciplinary meeting points, timbre and orchestration studies stress dialogue between the various branches of music production and scholarship, and as such, students from a wide array of music disciplines are welcome in this course.

The aesthetic, technical, and practical considerations of composing for film and television will form a significant part of the course content. As a final project the students will be expected to compose music for an actual film. The course is open to graduate and upper-year undergraduate composers. Non-composition majors with composing experience may be allowed into the course after an interview with the instructor.

Over the past decades, theoretical and analytical interest in musical form in the late 18th and early 19th centuries has surged in North America and beyond. Concepts first presented in two landmark publications of what has become known as the "new Formenlehre" — Caplin's Classical Form (1998) and Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory (2006) — have not only entered the lingua franca of international music theory, but have also stirred intense methodological debates.

This seminar offers a thorough study of differing recent approaches to classical form and their practical application through analysis of music between c. 1760 and 1825. Over the course of the seminar, we will read both central texts of the new Formenlehre and recent responses, adaptations, and alternatives to them, and analyze compositions in a variety of genres by a broad range of composers.

This course will examine the music, influence, and legacy of these three influential composers. Study of their compositional techniques and that of their colleagues will give some insight into trends in music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Other composers considered may include, but not be limited to, Jolivet, Jolas, Ustvolskaya, Gubaidulina, Tavener, and Vasks.

The course will introduce composers to basic conducting and rehearsal techniques.

The course will discuss some of the last century's representative operas, from Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande of 1902 to Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin of 2000, and also some of the lesser known but equally masterful exponents of the genre, such as Szymanowski's King Roger of 1926, Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero of 1941, and Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise of 1983. Balancing historical and theoretical approaches, the course will aim at elucidating the ambivalent role of one of Western music's defining genres during a tradition-defying period.

This seminar emphasizes current and emerging aesthetic trends in composition. This course includes reading, listening, score study, and analysis relating individual works to current trends. The seminar welcomes all aesthetics but requires students to position their works within the current cultural context. Topics include: post-digitalism/post-internet aesthetics; hybridization and pop influence on the avant-garde; new approaches to rhythm, harmony, melody, and texture; sound mapping and sonification; appropriation, collaboration, and inspiration; spectral and post-spectral technique; computer-assisted composition; gesture and timbre.

The seminar studies musical structure in the compositions of Elliott Carter, who was active as a composer from the 1930s until his death at age 103 in 2012. Carter's oeuvre includes numerous instrumental pieces (solo, chamber, large ensemble, concerti), many texted works (vocal, vocal-instrumental, choral), two ballets, and one opera. We also survey other relevant extant sources, including monographs, journal articles, collections of essays, Carter's own writings, his Harmony Book and compositional sketches.

This course will explore the theory and practice of music recording. Students will study recording environments (studio, remote location), equipment and techniques using current hardware and software. 2-hour lecture/seminar. 4 hours studio time required.

A survey of North American concert music since 1990. For composition majors, performers, musicologists, theorists, and others interested in recent music. Analysis of individual works. Situating works within the composer’s oeuvre and within broader compositional trends. Study of relevant scholarly literature. Course requirements include listening, analysis, reading, class presentation, and a final paper.

What do audiences expect from music? Why do some musical works become universally acclaimed "masterpieces" while others disappear, and yet others acquire almost cult status? Since 1900, there has gradually evolved an aesthetic which deliberately eschews the expectations of the "mainstream" of music. This course begins with a brief examination of late Beethoven Quartets and Sonatas, in which the composer often seems to steer away from expectations, and moves through the experimental late work of Liszt. The cornerstones of this alternative aesthetic are Satie and Busoni, who usher in the 20th century. The course will also look at Medtner, Varese, Cage, Boulez, Feldman, Silvestrov, Ustvolskaya, and others who have deliberately turned away from the traditional expectations of audiences, and sometimes away from tradition itself.

Franz Schubert may well be the single most written-about composer in academic music theory of the last decade. This seminar focusses on the vocal, orchestral, chamber, and piano music Schubert composed from 1824 to 1828. Taking the recent literature as a starting point, students will develop analytical interpretations of several key works as well as use Schubert’s late music as a vehicle to survey and assess recent developments in music theory, including the new Formenlehre, neo-Riemannian theory, theories of rhythm and meter, perspectives on music-text relations, historical music theory, and theories of hermeneutics, narrativity, and agency in music

This practical course is a survey of the compositional practices of Western Art Music, beginning in the Medieval Era, and extending until the present day. The course will examine the predominant technical and aesthetic concerns of each era, with a focus on how historical practice can inform and transform contemporary composition. Students will create their own music based on the studied material, with the goal of taking inspiration from the music of the past without imitating it. This is a practical course, designed around the creation of original material. The course is intended to enrich the vocabulary of composition students and provide a broad understanding of the historical development of musical composition.

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.

An exploration of the so-called "New Polish School of Composition," which emerged after the death of Stalin and became one of the leading musical movements in postwar Europe, represented by composers Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Gorecki, Serocki, Baird, and Kilar, among many others. The course will be both historical and analytical in nature and discuss musical concepts such as sonorism and limited aleatoricism, while reflecting on their potential application in contemporary (21st-century) composition.

This seminar offers a survey of theoretical and analytical approaches to popular music, a fast-growing subdiscipline of music theory. Readings will draw on recent scholarship in the areas of form, tonality, harmony, melody, phrasing, texture, rhythm, metre, and timbre, and analytical techniques will be applied to a variety of repertoire from rock, pop, hip hop, and related genres. Students are encouraged to engage their analytical work with discussions of music performance, perception, and popular music’s bilateral relationship with society. Work will include critical reading responses, short transcription/analytical assignments, and a final analytical paper and presentation.

This course offers an introduction to music cognition, a research field that embraces perspectives and methodologies from music theory, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and related disciplines. Representative topics include: music and social bonding, perception and cognition of pitch and timbre, musical expectancy, meter and entrainment, embodied cognition, relationship between music and language, music and emotion, and cross-cultural work in music cognition. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to critically appraise published studies involving behavioral experiments and large music corpora, interpret data presented in such studies, design an empirical study of their own, and extrapolate ideas for future research. Course requirements include weekly reading responses and a semester-long research project on a topic of the student’s choosing.

This seminar examines recent and historical approaches to public music theory. It situates music theory within the realm of publicly engaged scholarship, broadly defined as intellectual and creative activities for and with communities beyond the academy. Course topics include: historical perspectives on "the listener," music theory and the changing media landscape, music theory and social responsibility, and applied music theory and community engagement. Students will read and respond to literature on public scholarship, review and critique examples of public music theory (e.g., podcasts, blog posts, YouTube videos), and work collaboratively to develop original content with public engagement in mind.