MUS510 is for students in the department who wish to gain experience of central importance to their area of study by working outside of the University capacity.
Sound is at once ephemeral in air, concrete in material, and conceptualized in the mind. This unique transformation makes sound ideal for examining the relationship of our internal experience to physicality.
STC204B: Musical Instruments, Sound, Perception, and Creativity
Dan Trueman
Musical instruments reside at the intersection of varied topics: sound, perception, embodiment, music theory, social values, and more; how has their design influenced the development of music and how might they be reinvented to spur new ideas?
STC204A: Musical Instruments, Sound, Perception, and Creativity
Dan Trueman
Musical instruments reside at the intersection of varied topics: sound, perception, embodiment, music theory, social values, and more; how has their design influenced the development of music and how might they be reinvented to spur new ideas?
MUS548: Creative Practice in Cultural Perspective: Humanity and Dominance in the Arts
Barbara White
An exploration of the tension between humane and dominant tendencies in the arts. The creative arts are often idealized for their virtue and transcendence, for their ability to enrich and inspire us.
This course examines the role of repetition as a compositional element in music and architecture. This topic is a starting-off point for an examination of connections between the practices of composing music and composing architecture.
Philosophy and Music: We discuss a variety of philosophical issues important to musicians, mostly aesthetics but also considering philosophy more generally.
"What if?" tries to understand complex musical surfaces using transcription and transformation. We start by looking at examples from Hans Abrahamsen, Unsuk Chin, Gerard Grisey, Kaija Saariaho and Claude Vivier.
What is musical listening? To what extent is musical listening suffused by other experiences, concepts, and sensory modalities? Is there a distinctively musical mode of perception? How can musical listening be studied and theorized?
MUS513: Topics in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Music: Russian Opera
Simon A. Morrison
An analysis - musical, literary, and more broadly cultural - of greater and lesser-known Russian operas. Censorship is a point of focus, and politics, but the discussions concentrate on dramaturgical matters.
This seminar exposes participants to both canonical and cutting-edge work in ethnomusicology. By the end of the semester, students will have a thorough knowledge of key question animating the discipline.
MUS340: Advanced Concepts in Jazz Improvisation: Creating Fresh Vocabulary
Rudresh Mahanthappa
This course will help students to develop new approaches as an improviser via transcribing solos of various jazz icons and analyzing their melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic content.
A composition course for independent, self-directed composers working in any style. The primary requirement is to compose a substantial piece and present it at our class concert at the end of the semester.
This course is an overview of modernism in European and Euro-American art music, including movements such as symbolism, expressionism, and neoclassicism.
An introduction to the history of 18th-century music, giving equal attention to the pre-Classical and Classical periods, and covering France, England and Italy as well as Germany.
The PU Steel Band course will focus on the history and performance practice surrounding the steel drum band and its traditional musics from Trinidad and Tobago.
A performance course that focuses on the development of style, concept, and repertoire in the jazz idiom. Students are coached by faculty in extended projects in performance.
