Courses in Music History, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology. Many courses have no prerequisites.
This course surveys the music of the Western “cultivated” tradition from 1600-1915 (the “Baroque,” “Classical,” and “Romantic” periods). The repertoire is presented through lectures, discussion, readings, and sound recordings. Emphasis is on an analysis of and engagement with actual musical compositions, representative of the principal stylistic developments characteristic of each of the three major style periods. [GM2, H]
Prerequisite: MUS 121 or Permission of Instructor
Instructor(s): Jorge Torres, Anthony Cummings
This course examines music since 1915 through extensive listening. Course content includes a survey of Western art music as well as examples of blues, jazz, musical theater, rock, and non-Western music. The repertoire is presented through a study of readings, sound recordings, films, and lectures. Students encounter the communities, histories, traditions, and newer forms of expression of music since the early decades of the 20th century.
Prerequisite: MUS 121 or Permission of Instructor
Instructor(s): Jorge Torres, Anthony Cummings
One-hundred-fifty years ago, Charles Darwin published his treatise on the origin of species, and Richard Wagner composed his opera Tristan and Isolde. This course examines nineteenth-century [mis]applications of Darwinian theories, reflected in Wagner’s operas, replete with subliminal references to the superiority of Germanic peoples and inferiority on non-Germanic peoples. We shall: read Darwin and texts reflecting his influence in Germany; view Wagner’s operas; and consider Wagner’s influence on Adolf Hitler. [H, GM2, V, W]
Instructor(s): Anthony Cummings
This course will introduce the principal musical traditions of Japan from ancient court music (Gagaku) to contemporary genres. Integrated readings and discussions of social institutions, religious practice, and historically rigid class hierarchies will inform the musical explorations. Through guided listening and performing exercises we will explore Shinto and Buddhist rituals, important theater traditions (Noh and Kabuki), classical instrumental forms (koto, shamisen, shakuhachi), and various folk-related genres. [H, GM2]
Prerequisites: MUS 103 or permission of instructor
Instructor(s): Larry Stockton
This course will explore the diversity of musical expression and related cultural traditions found in selected regions of West Africa. Examination, analysis, and performance of ritual and ceremonial-based musical genres and investigations of related cultural practices will form the core of study that will also incorporate comparative readings in African history, religions, geography, the impact of colonialism, and the global spread of West African music. [H, GM2]
Prerequisites: MUS 103 or permission of instructor
Instructor(s): Larry Stockton
This course focuses on the influence of Latin American and Caribbean popular music on the United States. Possible areas of concentration may include Salsa, Latin Rock, Bossa Nova, Latin Jazz, and Latin American music in the media. Students learn about the music through readings, recordings, and live performance. The course also introduces students to issues of musical creolization, appropriation, and music as an emblem of identity. [GM1]
No prerequisite
Instructor(s): Jorge Torres
This course will examine outstanding musical achievements of women throughout history and in contemporary society. Women’s global contribution to music will be explored through diverse styles of composition and performance, active participation in education, and patronage. Topics include music and power, gender, class, challenging the “roles,” and performing identities. In an active classroom environment, students will have ample opportunity to challenge, lead, and discover their own contribution to the arts through valid argument. [H, W]
Prerequisites: A Music course or a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course, or permission of instructor
Instructor(s): Jennifer Kelly
In this course, we shall concentrate specifically on understanding Italian music during its “Golden Age” (1300-1900): the six centuries from the Middle Ages (the time of Dante) through the period of the “great tradition” of nineteenth-century Italian opera. We shall simultaneously consider the larger question of what constitutes a national music. In addition, Italians’ music has been deployed at various times in their history to create a more local (regional or dynastic-familial) political and cultural identity, and the course will examine such uses of music as well. Students may not earn credit for both MUS 260 and MUS 360. [GM2, H]
Instructor(s): Anthony Cummings
A study of songs written by dozens of great composers and lyricists, such as Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, George & Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields, and many more. Songs performed by Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, and many more.
Instructor(s): Skip Wilkins
Explores the early history of jazz, America’s principal contribution to world musical-culture. Considers jazz antecedents-the blues, ragtime-and origins in early twentieth century New Orleans. Then considers the “Chicago School,” early territory bands, “New Orleans revival,” big band tradition of the 1940s, and small group sessions and beginnings of bebop. Although there is consideration of the historical/music-historical backgrounds, emphasis is on the music itself, through original recordings and scholarly transcriptions, which permit detailed analyses of jazz characteristics at critical moments in history. Students may not earn credit for both MUS 263 and MUS 363. [H, GM1]
Instructor(s): Anthony Cummings
The beginning of jazz modernism in the 1940s and the styles spawned by Bebop in the ensuing decades. Small group jazz styles include Bebop, Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, Modal, Post-bop, Avant Garde and Fusion, as well as some large ensemble music in various styles. The great performers and innovators, chiefly African-American, and their repertoire from these eras in instrumental and vocal music. Seminal figures including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and many more. The cultural and social background of these changing times and a study of jazz innovations emerging primarily from the Black community. Extensive listening and discovery. The ability to read music is not required.
Instructor(s): Skip Wilkins
Opera is a theatrical genre where the text is sung throughout, and the music contributes indispensably to the work’s dramatic and emotional impact. This course considers what makes the experience of opera so compelling for so many. It surveys a handful of the greatest operatic masterpieces from the beginnings of opera to the nineteenth-century “great tradition” and considers contrasts of comic and serious opera, music that narrates vs. music that provides lyrical commentary, etc. Students may not earn credit for both MUS 272 and MUS 372. [H]
Instructor(s): Anthony Cummings
This course examines the social and political contexts for popular music in the 1960’s. Students will explore the cultural conditions that supported music in U.S. centers such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Through an examination of primary and secondary sources, as well as in-class video viewing, class participants will gain knowledge of how music of a counter cultural generation was representative of an emerging social consciousness, as well as how it was used as a form of social protest. [W, GM1]
Prerequisites: MUS 102, 103, 201, or permission of instructor
Instructor(s): Jorge Torres
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