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 548: Creative Practice in Cultural Perspective: Ethics in the Arts
The creative arts are often idealized for their virtue and transcendence, for their ability to enrich and inspire. However, such idyllic notions risk overlooking difficult ethical issues that may arise in artworks, as well as in the arts world. This seminar considers a wide range of artworks to ask, what might truly ethical arts practices look like? Topics are largely student-driven and may include participants’ own creative work. Possible areas of focus include critique and reenvisioning: restaging of canonical works, reshaping the canon, representation of (dis)ability, and inclusion more generally.
MUS 545: Contexts of Composition: Composing for Orchestra
The course investigates available strategies for harnessing the vast potential of the orchestra for an individual and personal vision. Notation, instrumental acoustics, and the psychology of the humans that play them are discussed in the context of score study, compositional exercises in response to prompts and free composition.
MUS 534: Ends and Means: Issues in Composition
In this seminar, we study musical forms and patterns. The topics include existing musical forms like formes fixes, contrapuntal forms, and sonatas; parallels and disjunctures between music and literature in the ways time, perspectives, and narratives are shaped; and music inspired by geometrical shapes and patterns (polygons, fractals, tessellations, spirals, waves, etc.), both man-made and natural. We explore concepts such as self-similarity, (a)symmetry, and exponential changes. The objective is to broaden our understanding of musical form and develop creative narrative strategies.
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: Digital Musicology
Until recently, source scarcity was the norm for the study of early music, and its methods were built to respond to that condition. In the past decade, the situation has been turned on its head; we now have a larger and more various corpus of musical data at our fingertips than we can make sense of. This skills-building seminar draws on campus resources for digital humanities to practice new techniques and approaches to the digital corpus of premodern music, and imagines how these skills change the histories we can tell. Final papers should be historiographically fresh.
MUS 527: Seminar in Musicology: Interdisciplinarity in Music Studies
Is there a music studies? Should there be? How can its various subdisciplines sustain productive dialogue with one another? This course invites students to think about the purposes and practices of music research. In addition to engaging the scholarly literature on music and interdisciplinarity, students also engage in hands-on practicums in reading, writing, and communicating across disciplines. Students are encouraged to bring their own subdiscipline into the classroom – the broader the range of backgrounds in the class, the more successful it will be.
MUS 513: Topics in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Music: Abstraction
This semester explores the origins and exploitation of the concept of abstraction in music from circa 1910. There is some discussion of the articulation of the term in the visual arts (Kandinsky, Klee), but the seminar centers on the syntax of the modern, late modern, and after modern periods in 20th century music history. Repertoire discussed includes Schoenberg, Babbitt, and Feldman, and both “dissonant” and “consonant” abstraction. Besides active seminar participation, formal requirements include written responses to the listening/viewing assignments, music and dance analyses, and a final research paper on a pre-approved topic.
MUS 561: 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: Performing Electronic Music
Strategies for performing electronic music live. We go through different technical and philosophic approaches to performing electronic music and walk through different scenarios such as playing through a small PA stereo vs multichannel performances.
MUS 542: Instrumentation and Performance
Collaborations with varied ensembles and performers from around the world and here at Princeton, presented in concert on the Princeton Sound Kitchen concert series.
MUS 534: Ends and Means: Issues in Composition
This seminar explores the historical and current repertoire for string quartet, accumulates a set of best practices, and applies them to regular sketching assignments to be read by a visiting string quartet. The culmination is a concert in the following semester made of string quartet music produced by the members of the class.
MUS 532: 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: What Makes Music Good? Aesthetics, Value, and Taste
This seminar considers various arguments for what constitutes good music. Emphasis is placed on modern aesthetic theory and its legacies, elaborations, and critiques.
MUS 525: Topics in Music from 1400 to 1600: Changing Styles in Sacred Music, 1420-1560
A hands-on encounter with sacred music of the Renaissance, covering the 160-year period 1400-1560. In the Renaissance, the word “music” was synonymous with counterpoint. What wasn’t counterpoint was either Gregorian chant or else a confused din of sounds. Like the word “language” can be synonymous with English in remote parts of the world, and other tongues sound like mere grunting. But within the English language, and within the art of counterpoint, there are vast worlds of meaning and expression to explore. We will be travelling a journey that leads us past some of the most glorious music in history.
MUS 521: Topics in Global Music Theory
What is “global” about global music theory? What does this subfield promise for the wider discipline of music studies, for the traditions making up the global musicscape, and for the people behind those musics? This course examines the key questions, methods, and stakes of global music theory through the lens of recent scholarly discourse, with coverage on topics including translation practices, music theory pedagogy, and the perennial debate between universality and cultural relativism. To contextualize the emergence of this subfield, we also discuss relevant literature in world music analysis and comparative musicology.
MUS 501: Musicology as a Profession
This seminar seeks to enhance and refine the skills required for the successful preparation of the general examination in musicology and the oral defense. The seminar also takes up, in hands-on fashion, archival research methods, digital research (including AI tools), interview methods, the writing of the dissertation prospectus, grant applications, conference abstracts and proposals, articles, reviews, and the broader publication process. The seminar is interactive, based on weekly assignments that address both the requirements of Princeton’s graduate program and the challenges of the entire profession.
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 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 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 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 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.