MUS 105: Music Theory through Performance and Composition
Music 105 introduces foundational elements of music making, while considering relevant contextual information like form, function, and identity. A broad and inclusive range of musical genres from around the world will be examined in equal measure to help develop holistic insight into how and why music works. The course is designed to strengthen your ability to analyze a wide variety of existing music from the past and present, and gain new approaches to composing your own. The emphasis is firmly on the practical application of the concepts we encounter within music, rather than an abstract understanding of limited musical methods.
MPP 298: Independent Instruction in Voice or Instrument (Non-credit)
Independent instruction in voice or instrument is an intensive immersion in all aspects of recreating music for performance. Lessons are geared towards the development and embedding of solid technique, and the application of this technique to proper style and musical expression. Issues explored include but are not limited to interpretation, stylistic appropriateness, historical context, theoretical/syntactical underpinnings, the avoidance of injuries, audition and performance strategies, and career planning.
MPP 251: Jazz Fundamentals
This 12-week performance course is an introduction to the language and concepts of Jazz improvisation. The course will use classic performances as material for developing listening acuity, vocabulary, memory, analysis, and historical grasp of the music’s evolution in the mid-20th century. By the end of the course, students should be able to improvise through basic song forms with technical competence and confidence in their ability to hear and produce melodies spontaneously.
MPP 231: Princeton University Steel Band
Students will be taught the performance practices of the steel band originating in Trinidad and Tobago.
MPP 214: Projects in Vocal Performance: Vocal Music of Les Six
Vocal instructors Barbara Rearick and Ronald Cappon invite you to explore the songs of the six composers of Post World War I France known as Les Six. These composers were part of a movement aiming to breathe new life into music quintessentially French in character, free of GermanicTeutonicism, musical Impressionism, and dry musical academicism. The course is for up to 10 singers and 3 pianists, capping at 13 and participation is based on audition.
MPP 213: Projects in Instrumental Performance: Chamber Music
Instrumental chamber music of the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, both canonic and non-canonic. Preparation for performance of ensembles. Each ensemble’s repertoire will be determined in consultation with the instructors during the first week of classes.
MUS 228: Sound/Material/Mind
Sound is at once ephemeral in air, concrete in material, and conceptualized in the mind. This unique quality makes sound ideal for examining the relationship of our internal experience to physicality. In this course, students will reconsider sound as material through projects exploring physical technologies of sound-making along with listening and viewings of related arts and artists, readings and writings in theories of sound, new media, and phenomenology. This class offers a hybrid experience – an engagement with art-making and seminar, reconsidering our relationship to the body, physical material, and sound embodied in the world.
MUS 204: Musical Instruments, Sound, Perception, and Creativity
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? We will explore these questions through readings, listening, analysis, labs, and composition. Specific topics include: harmony and the keyboard; tuning and temperament; preparing the piano, digital and analog. More generally, we will consider the productive tension between qualitative and quantitative understandings of musical concepts.
MUS 560: Music Cognition Lab
Under the direction of a faculty member, and in collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of students, visitors, and postdocs, the student carries out a one-semester research project chosen jointly by the student and the faculty. Open to any graduate student in Music, this course provides a hands-on opportunity to learn the tools, skills, methods, and perspectives of music cognition research.
MUS 545: Contexts of Composition: Idiosyncratic Instruments
A forum for exploring instrument design and the development of instruments for specific composition or music-making contexts. An Idiosyncratic Instrument might be a prepared conventional instrument, a Max for Live Ableton device, a sensor-based dance interface, an instrument in just-intonation scordatura, a modular synthesizer patch, and so on. We look at a range of examples and relevant readings/music. While we won’t be directly teaching programming in the seminar, composers interested in fulfilling their language requirement with a programming language could find this a good context for building a project to do so.
MUS 541: Seminar in Music Composition
Composing for improvisers. In this class we explore composing open-form pieces for both skilled and unskilled improvisers. The class is mostly practical, with regular composition exercises, leading to a concert in the spring. We also study existing compositions that make effective use of improvisation.
MUS 534: Ends and Means: Issues in Composition
This seminar is taught in collaboration with SO Percussion Princeton University’s Ensemble in Residence. Participants are asked to explore various approaches to composing for percussion in a series of exercises that are read by SO and discussed by the entire seminar. As the semester draws to a close participants begin work on original compositions which are performed by SO later in the Spring term.
MUS 531: Composition
Emphasis is placed upon the individual student’s original work and upon the study and discussion of pieces pertinent to that work.
MUS 528: Seminar in Musicology: History of Music Listening in the West
A sampling of views from the history of music listening: Appreciation of music requires understanding. The sweetness of musical sound is incomprehensible. Musical sound is mere vibration of air. Musical sound has mind-altering powers; it is unsafe without edifying text. Music, when freed from text, can reach transcendence. Without text, music is agreeable at best. Music has meaning. Music depicts. Music expresses. Music dies with the final chord, and is a reminder of death. Musical sound carries life-giving spirit; it animates. How do we make historical and philosophical sense of all this? That will be the challenge we face in this seminar.
MUS 520: Topics in Music from 1600 to 1800: Women and Music in Seicento Venice: Barbara Strozzi
The seminar focuses on the seventeenth-century composer and Barbara Strozzi, whose eight published volumes of music fully exploit the expressive potential of mid-seventeenth century music. The adopted (and perhaps illegitimate) daughter of Giulio Strozzi, Barbara was renowned as a singer for her performances in Venetian academic circles associated with her father. MUS 520 explores Strozzi’s music and life in early modern Venice; her relationship to other composers and “exceptional” female artists; early modern academies and contemporary views about gender and sexuality; performance practice and editing.
MUS 527: Seminar in Musicology: Animal Music
This seminar considers various responses to the question: Do animals make music? We approach the question in an interdisciplinary manner, and from three broad perspectives: from the perspective of composers, from the perspective of the history of science, and from the vantage of contemporary animal behavior science. The seminar aims to give participants a solid, if not exactly comprehensive, view of the field. We examine composers such as Messiaen, Respighi, Pamela Z, and David Dunn, and the writings of ornithologists and cetologists past and present.
MUS 357: Music and Shakespeare
A survey of Shakespeare’s treatment of music in the plays and sonnets. The course is based on primary sources only; images will be provided. It also features multiple original songs. The focus is on their dramatic function within complete scenes. At all times we will engage in close reading. We will address a range of relevant historical themes, including: harmony and unity, sound and spirit, music education, rhetoric and decorum, male friendship, the power of the eyes, the art of letter-writing, Puritans and music, and music and melancholy. The course includes a visit to the Rare Books Room.
MUS 350: Studies in African Performance
This course presents a cross-disciplinary and multi-modal approach to African music, dance, and culture. Co-taught by a master drummer and choreographer (Tarpaga) and an ethnomusicologist (Steingo), students will explore African and African diasporic performance arts through readings, discussions, listening, film analysis, and music performance.
MUS 347: Multidisciplinary Musical Storytelling – Tularosa: An American Dreamtime
Using the musical story-work “Tularosa: An American Dreamtime” as a springboard,
students will explore the mythology of the American West and musical storytelling
through a multidisciplinary lens. Students will then use a variety of creative methods
including songwriting, theatrical performance, experimental movement and dance,
video, dramaturgy, archival and site-specific research, and artifact- and symbol-making
to create unique multidisciplinary storytelling projects from their own points of view.
MUS 344: The Ceremony is You
An exploration of ritual and ceremony as creative, interdisciplinary spaces imbued with intention and connected to personal and cultural histories. A broadening and deepening of knowledge around historical and contemporary ritual, ceremonial, and community-building practices of queer and trans artist communities from around the world, with a deeper focus on the extraordinary history of the queer trans shamans of early 20th century Korea.
MUS 343: Thinking Through Musical Sound
How do musical sounds hang together and convey meaningful ideas to its local audience-emotions, stories, philosophies, even cosmologies? This course holds in tension musical sound’s acoustic, semiotic, and ideological dimensions to theorize how it answers to diverse aesthetic and epistemic conditions across listening cultures. Students will engage a range of musical sounds through embodied analysis, (auto)ethnography, and close readings in music theory, ethnomusicology, and music perception. While this course welcomes students without previous training in music theory, it is also poised to challenge those with substantial experience.
MUS 341: Atonality and Noise
This class considers atonality and noise as resources for 20th & 21st century musicians, ranging freely across folk, popular, and notated traditions. We begin with percussion music, music concrete, and sampling; then consider pitch as a kind of noise: free atonality, free improvisation, textural music (Penderecki, Xenakis, etc.), and spectralism. Also fusions of pitch and noise: feedback, distortion, extended techniques, and modular synthesis. Ending with set theory, total serialism, and the attempt to devise a “language” of atonality.
MUS 340: Advanced Concepts in Jazz Improvisation: Creating Fresh Vocabulary
In this course, we will examine various approaches to chromatic improvisation and composition as well as advanced rhythm techniques. Topics will include concepts such as superimposition, fixed intervals, pitch cells, modes, synthetic scales, 12-tone systems, chromatic harmonization, reharmonization, serialism, polyrhythm, additive rhythm, and more. We will also have several visiting guest artists who are high-level practitioners in the field. Past guests included Anna Webber, Gary Thomas, Miles Okazaki, and Dan Weiss.
MUS 338: Music in the Global Middle Ages
Moving from Baghdad to Paris, Jerusalem to Addis Ababa, Iceland to Dunhuang, this course examines the musical cultures of some of the most vibrant centers of the Middle Ages. We consider what it means to study medieval music “globally,” focusing on key moments of cultural contact (trade, pilgrimage, conflict), while remaining attuned to the particularities of specific places. Emphasis is on the physical traces of premodern music, and we encounter the distant musical past in a variety of materials and formats (paper manuscripts, papyrus fragments, parchment rolls, stone steles), meeting weekly in Special Collections.