139 courses with the subject MUSIC, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
In this half-semester course, students will become familiar with the elements of music notation (staves, clefs, pitch names, note and rest values) and with some of the basic skills necessary for college-level music instruction (e.g., construction and identification of scales, intervals, triads, and basic diatonic functions).
It is now possible to create electronic music with a variety of powerful and flexible computer-based tools. Through reading, discussion, demonstration, listening sessions, technical tutorials and hands-on projects, we will explore the techniques, practices and aesthetics surrounding creative applications of current and emerging music technologies, including sound recording and editing, mixing, synthesis and electronic music composition.
This course will follow the origins and evolution of jazz from the late nineteenth century to the present, with emphases on prominent stylistic trends and significant individuals. Along with some analysis of the musical language jazz employs, the music will be examined in its relation to the social contexts that helped produce and shape it. The ability to read music is not a requirement for this course.
This course will introduce singers to the physiology of human voice and healthy vocal technique through readings and visual sources on vocal anatomy. Students will examine vocal repertoire spanning approximately 500 years, explore various Western/international singing styles in English, Italian, French, German, etc., as well as receiving an introduction to diction, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and its application to various languages. Music of composers from historically marginalized backgrounds will be highlighted. Theoretical knowledge will culminate in practical demonstrations via presentations and performances in class.
The term "girl groups" typically refers to the close-harmony all-women pop groups of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet groups like the Andrews Sisters, the Shirelles, and, most famously, the Supremes, represent only one manifestation of a centuries-long musical practice in which groups of young women have sung together, from enslaved women of the medieval Islamic world to the concerto delle donne of Renaissance Italy to Vivaldi's young pupils at the Ospedale della Pietà. For centuries, these groups have enthralled listeners and inspired composers. This course looks at the history of this musical phenomenon, with critical attention to its spaces, reception, and relationships and what they tell us about gender and musicking over time.
This course delves into the intricate world of auditory perception, exploring how humans interpret, experience, and make sense of sound. Students will journey through the art of hearing, discuss the sensations of hearing, how sound colors our perception of the world, and how the sound worlds we live in are increasingly curated and constructed. The course will cover a range of topics, including historical definitions of pitch, time, and sound forms, and the influence of cultural and environmental factors on how we perceive sound. We will also investigate the role of hearing in communication, music, and soundscapes, and consider how technological advancements are transforming the way we interact with sound. Through hands-on experiments, critical listening sessions, and interdisciplinary readings, students will gain a holistic understanding of sound perception, learning to appreciate its profound impact on human experience. By the end of the course, participants will have developed an enhanced awareness of the role sound plays in shaping our environment and our lives.
Remembered primarily for being the decade when popular music demanded a reality check, the 1970s will be the framework for a critical and analytical survey of some of the more fertile developments and influential ideas that originated, flourished, and/or declined in that era. Topics will include minimalism, jazz-rock fusion, reggae, disco, punk, and the accompanying multiculturalism that informed social/political/economic conditions that bred these styles.
Chamber Music for wind instruments
Chamber Music for string instruments
Chamber Music for piano instruments
Chamber music for mixed ensembles.
Chamber Music for brass instruments
This ensemble, composed of all instruments -- including piano, strings, brass, and woodwinds -- performs dance music of Eastern Europe. Students at all levels of experience will use their classical training to go beyond the printed page into the folk tradition, learning to play different modes of the tunes and employing 'untraditional' techniques that are traditional in this unique folk music.
Study and perform music for flute ensembles.
This course offers opportunities to play and sing chamber music from the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras, collaborating with musicians from the Five Colleges and with the support of a specialist coach. Ensemble members will draw on historical context and performance practice as they refine performance technique and ensemble skills. Singers and instrumentalists will be sorted into ensembles based on level- from beginner to advanced- and areas of interest. Chamber ensembles also offer an opportunity to develop skills for more advanced projects such as those of the Five College Collegium (see MUSIC-147A). The Early Music Program has a large collection of historical instruments to loan.
Chamber Music for percussion instruments.
The Five College Collegium is the flagship ensemble of the Five College Early Music Program. The ensemble is made up of experienced singers and instrumentalists from the Five College Consortium, and prepares two large-scale projects in the course of the academic year for public performance. The Collegium rotates its rehearsal residency among the schools in the Five College system, and focuses on repertoire from the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Whenever possible, the Collegium invites professional musicians as guests to work with the ensemble on material that is relevant to the current project.
Sixteenth- through eighteenth-century European social dance, contemporary with the eras of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare in England, the Medicis in Italy, Louis XIV in France, and colonial America. The focus will be on learning the dances, supplemented by historical and social background, discussion of the original dance sources, and reconstruction techniques.
Continuation of Renaissance and Baroque Dance I. Sixteenth- through eighteenth-century European social dance, contemporary with the eras of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare in England, the Medicis in Italy, Louis XIV in France, and colonial America. The focus will be on learning the dances, supplemented by historical and social background, discussion of the original dance sources, and reconstruction techniques.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Private study - individual instruction in the use of current and emerging technologies for the creation and performance of electronic music and sonic art.
A mixed instrumental group for beginning, intermediate, and advanced musicians. Students study a variety of classic and contemporary swing, Latin, jazz, and pop standards. There are several performance opportunities each semester.
A select vocal ensemble that studies classic and contemporary jazz, Broadway and pop standards. Members are encouraged to audition for solos with the Big Band and Chamber Jazz Ensembles. There are several performance opportunities each semester.
This course will focus on learning by ear and playing polyrhythmic music from southern Ghana, Togo and Benin, including sections of Gahu, Adjogbo and Agbekor. All students will learn drum, rattle and bell parts, some songs and some dance steps as well. Non musicians are welcome, but practicing between classes is required. The group will perform at the end of the semester.
Studies and presents a variety of orchestra repertoire on and off campus. Multiple opportunities to perform each semester.
Beginning ensemble. Well-suited to beginning to intermediate singers. Sight-reading and music theory are incorporated throughout the course. Emphasis is placed on developing techniques for healthy and beautiful vocal production, learning critical listening skills, singing with expression and understanding, and ultimately demonstrating growth as choral musicians. The ensemble explores music from a variety of languages, styles, and cultures.
This course will explore a range of approaches and techniques involved in the creation of electronic and computer music, including aspects of form and development, analog and digital synthesis and signal processing, basic computer music programming, and audio recording and production techniques. The focus of this seminar will be a series of exercises and creative projects that develop aesthetic and technical abilities. This creative work will be supported and enriched by selected reading and listening examples, as well as ongoing technical labs and demonstrations.
The field of acoustic ecology is particularly concerned with how we create, interpret and interact with the sounds around us and how imbalances in the soundscape may affect human health and the natural world. Through reading, discussion, listening sessions, independent research, and hands-on projects, we will examine the broad interdisciplinary fields of acoustic ecology and sonic art. We will engage historical, conceptual, and aesthetic aspects of sound as a cultural, environmental, and artistic medium, with an emphasis on listening, psychoacoustics, soundscape studies, field recording and soundscape composition. We will question predominant ideas regarding the relationships between location, environment, sound, silence, music, and noise, and test these ideas through individual and group research as well as hands-on sonic art projects.
This course provides an introduction to the art and science of multitrack audio recording and music production. Through reading, discussion, listening sessions, tutorials, and hands-on projects, students will explore the technical and creative aspects of the recording process. Topics will include microphone selection and placement, recording, overdubbing, mixing strategies, and the use of professional digital audio workstations in the production workflow. We will develop critical listening skills and musical and sonic aesthetics, covering a range of styles, genres, and production approaches.
Students will explore a number of musical styles and approaches in the process of creating their own extended works, with the possibility of performances at the end of the semester.
This course is designed as a follow-up to MUSIC-117, Foundations of Voice I, with a primary focus on in-class study, singing, and accompanying of Western Art songs and International Folk songs (Mexican, French, Arabic, Czech, German, American). Course study will include an overall examination of composers, performance practice, musical styles, poetry, structural form, and nationalistic characteristics. All students will participate in regular in-class performances of music by well-known as well as historically marginalized composers. Music by Purcell, Mozart, Fanny Mendelssohn, Schubert, L. Boulanger, Dvorák, Crawford Seeger, Fauré, Price, Ravel, Beach and more.
This course is for all who stay to the end of the credits, purchase soundtracks, and argue over who should have won the Oscar for Best Score, along with anyone else interested in the undervalued importance of music to the general effect of a motion picture. We will explore and discuss the myriad ways in which these two media interact. The course will focus on classic scores by Herrmann, Morricone, and Williams, as well as the uses of pre-existing music in films of Kubrick and Tarantino.
This course is a survey of selected musical traditions from different parts of the world, including Africa, Indonesia, Indian, the Caribbean, and the United States. The course adopts an ethnomusicological approach that explains music as a cultural phenomenon, and explores the social and aesthetic significance of musical traditions within their respective historical and cultural contexts. It examines how musical traditions change over time, and how such changes reflect and relate to social and political changes within a given society. Weekly reading and listening assignments provide the basis for class discussions.
The course begins by examining African performance practices, notably musical storytelling and ensemble organization, and the significance of music in society. It culminates in rehearsals and a public performance of a new opera by students and professionals. This allows students to gain practical experience and reflect on the theoretical perspectives examined earlier in the semester. The opera, "Tortured Song," centers on music as both a tool of resistance and a victim of censorship in the Black colonial and post-colonial world. "Song" is personified as Orin, who travels across black communities, conversing with divinities and political leaders, and mobilizing in her search for freedom.
Studies diatonic harmony (part-writing, inversions, harmonization, figured bass and non-harmonic tones) and begins the exploration of chromaticism. Includes analysis, aural skills, and keyboard harmony.
How do we know how the art music of Europe was performed 400 years ago? What does it mean to sing and play in a historically informed manner in the modern era? How do we improvise and ornament? How do we shape this music, expressing its style and drama? This course introduces a practical application of early music performance practice, and examines the historical, editorial, and theatrical aspects of masterworks such as Monteverdi's Orfeo, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Jacquet de la Guerre's Judith, and more. The course will include regular in-class performances or presentations, opera screenings, and a field trip to a major early music performance in Boston.
Pop and jazz involve different types of musical texts. From open mic nights to top-40 hits, pop performances are enactments of carefully crafted song structures. In contrast, jazz musicians treat tunes more flexibly-as frameworks to guide improvisation. In separate units for the pop song and the jazz tune, this course examines how harmony, melody, rhythm, lyrics, and form unite to inspire great performances in both traditions. Each unit will include nuts-and-bolts assignments to build analytical and compositional skills, which will be applied in a composition project at the end of each unit.
The course focuses on the musics of Africa and the African diaspora through the lens of ethnomusicology. Concentrating on countries like Brazil, Cuba, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States, it examines the musical performance of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality and the role of music in social and political movements. The course explores the global dimensions and resonances of Africanist musical cosmopolitanism as enabled historically and sustained through ongoing transatlantic exchanges between Africa and the African diasporas. Other topics covered include the global rise of Afrobeats, and the issues of representation in iconic works like Black Is King and Lemonade by Beyoncé.
Fundamentals of conducting: gestures, rehearsal techniques, study of representative short scores, and practice leading primarily choral ensembles. Videotaping, class recital.
This course explores the interplay between language, music and cognitive skills. For centuries, questions about the relationship between language and music have been asked by philosophers, artists, and scientists. Is music a language and is language a music? What is the evolutionary value of language and music? What are the formal characteristics that are shared between the two? What happens in the human mind when language or music breaks down? How can we design interdisciplinary studies to look into language and music? While no prior music education is required, the course will provide a comprehensive overview that bridges gaps between linguistics, music theory, and cognitive science.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 2 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Prereq: 8 credits of 100-level lessons or one semester of 200-level lessons. Notes: Repeatable for credit. Enrollment is limited according to teacher availability. Students enrolled in Individual Performance Study at the 200 level must participate in at least one public performance per semester, usually a 5-10 minute piece in a Shared Student Recital.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Private study - individual instruction in the use of current and emerging technologies for the creation and performance of electronic music and sonic art.
A select instrumental combo open to more advanced jazz musicians with emphasis on complex forms such as Dixieland, bop, and fusion. Students also learn exercises and techniques that will aid them in solo improvisation. There are several performance opportunities each semester.
This course will focus on learning by ear and playing polyrhythmic music from southern Ghana, Togo and Benin, including sections of Adjogbo and Agbekor. All students will learn drum, rattle and bell parts, some songs, and some dance steps. Non-musicians are welcome; practice between classes is required. The group will perform at the end of the semester.
The first in a four-semester survey of European and Eurocentric classical music, covering the period to 1700 and changes in how composers interacted with performers, audiences, critics, institutions, and society at large. We trace these changes through a fast-paced survey of representative works, including music by women composers, composers of color, and LGBTQ+ composers. We build skills in score reading, understanding musical forms and genres, interpreting primary sources, and writing music history. Course theme: Music and the Sacred. How did patronage within houses of worship (especially the Catholic church) influence how music was created, performed, circulated, and understood?
The second in a four-semester survey of European and Eurocentric classical music, covering the period from 1700 to 1850 and changes in how composers interacted with performers, audiences, critics, institutions, and society at large. We trace these changes through a fast-paced survey of representative works, including music by women composers, composers of color, and LGBTQ+ composers. We build skills in score reading, understanding musical forms and genres, interpreting primary sources, and writing music history. Course theme: Music and the Public. How did the rise of music publishing, public venues, criticism, conservatories, etc. affect the ways musicians navigated the marketplace?
The third in a four-semester survey of Western music history, MUSIC-283 examines the cultures of art music in Europe and the Americas from 1850 to 1950, focusing on the evolution of styles and genres and the changing roles of composers, performers, and audiences.
The fourth in a four-semester survey of European and Eurocentric classical music, covering the period since 1950 and changes in how composers interacted with performers, audiences, critics, institutions, and society at large. We trace these changes through a fast-paced survey of representative works, including music by women composers, composers of color, and LGBTQ+ composers. We build skills in score reading, understanding musical forms and genres, interpreting primary sources, and writing music history. Course theme: Music and the Machine. How have new technologies of notation, recording, broadcast, and digital media affected music since 1950, and the ways it is performed and understood?
Advanced ensemble with a varied classical, contemporary, and folk-derived repertoire. Sight-reading and music theory are incorporated throughout the course. Emphasis is placed on developing techniques for healthy and beautiful vocal production, learning critical listening skills, singing with expression and understanding, and ultimately demonstrating growth as choral musicians.
Fall and Spring. Credits: 1 - 4 Restrictions: Contact instructor for independent study declaration form and signatures.Instructor permission required.
Highly select chamber choir of 12-18 voices drawn from Glee Club and Chorale with an emphasis on musical independence. Members possess excellent music reading skills and are one of just a few voices on a part. Specializes in challenging classical and contemporary repertoire for treble voices.
This combined lecture series/seminar will expose students to a wide range of career options available in music and music-related fields. Guest speakers will present broad and varied approaches to creating a meaningful career in music, as well as sharing specific strategies, resources, and advice. This seminar will also include course readings and discussion, as well as skill building in entrepreneurial thinking and professional aspects of career development.
This innovative arts and technology course will explore emerging creative/technical practices that transcend any single medium or discipline. While sound will be a primary focus of the course, students will design, realize, and collaborate on projects that may also include still or moving images, text, graphics, installation, computation, interactivity, performance, etc. Class meetings will combine seminar-style discussions with listening, viewing and hands-on lab sessions, brainstorming, project development and feedback. Guest artists' visits and collaborations with other MHC arts and tech classes will enhance your exposure to sound and media arts practitioners.
Students will explore a number of musical styles and approaches in the process of creating their own extended works, with the possibility of performances a the end of the semester.
Art and music are a part of all human cultures. Is there something about the human brain that drives us to paint and sing? We will examine how the brain simultaneously processes different aspects of visual and auditory stimuli, ask how this processing may affect the way we do art and music, and explore where these phenomena may occur in the brain. As we engage in discussion and hands-on activities, we will discover the commonalities between the arts and the sciences including practice, experimentation, exploration, innovation, and creativity.
What does it mean to take pleasure seriously as a site of Black creative power? This course centers music and sound as key domains through which Black communities craft aesthetic worlds, sustain intimacy, and experiment with freedom. Engaging Black feminist thought, diaspora studies, and contemporary music scholarship, we explore how sonic practices-from improvisation and sampling to harmony, distortion, and groove-generate forms of relationality that exceed domination. We consider pleasure not as an escape, but as a world-making practice. This class invites students to think about music as both aesthetic practice and social theory.
The course provides an opportunity for advanced-level application of various analytical approaches to a small group of related works within a given musical tradition.
In conjunction with the Five College Opera's Spring 2026 production of Mozart's 1786 opera Le Nozze di Figaro, this course will give students a thorough grounding in the adaptation of plays into operas, and the analysis of opera. We will undertake a close reading of Beaumarchais' play (in translation), da Ponte's libretto, Mozart's settings, and a number of historic and contemporary productions, in order to explore how operas work with and against their source texts, and also how opera analysis and dramaturgy can inform creative choices about music and staging. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to decode text and music in opera, to critically engage with the analyses of other scholars, and to comprehend some of the challenges and drawbacks of opera analysis.
Miles Davis had a knack for rewriting the rules of jazz. At 19 he was working with bebop pioneers at the cutting edge of modern jazz. Rather than resting on his laurels, the experience sparked a career of exploration: he had a hand in almost every major jazz style for the next quarter-century, including cool jazz, hard bop, postbop, and fusion. With a focus on musical analysis, this course trains a (sunglassed) lens on Davis's many musical directions. Through weekly readings, written reflections, transcription analysis, and audio annotation, we explore questions of musical style and how it is shaped by musicians even as it shapes them.
This course asks what it means to create, consume, and analyze music across lines of cultural difference. In what ways do a repertoire's features become associated with -- or bound to -- the people who create it? As we listen and analyze across cultural lines, what aspects might be translated or lost; what might be gained? What distinguishes modes of interaction such as influence, hybridity, and appropriation? How do systems of power and oppression impact our thinking on these questions? In this course we explore these and other questions through reading, musical analysis, formal and informal writing, engagement with guest speakers, and discussion of case studies, centering musicians that have been marginalized by the academic discipline of music theory.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair, MUSIC-232, one 200-level history course, demonstration of prior public performance.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair, MUSIC-232, one 200-level history course, demonstration of prior public performance.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair, MUSIC-232, one 200-level history course, demonstration of prior public performance.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair, MUSIC-232, one 200-level history course, demonstration of prior public performance.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair, MUSIC-232, one 200-level history course, demonstration of prior public performance.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Performance study - individual instruction.
Not Scheduled for This Year. Credits: 4 Applies to requirement(s): Meets No Distribution RequirementInstructor permission required.Advisory: Permission of instructor and department chair, MUSIC-232, one 200-level history course, demonstration of prior public performance.Notes: Repeatable for credit. Continuation of studies at the 300 level depends on evaluation by the instructor and is not automatic. Students enrolled in one semester of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare a half-recital or its equivalent. Students enrolled in a full year of Individual Performance Study at the 300 level must prepare one full recital program or its equivalent.
Private study - individual instruction in the use of current and emerging technologies for the creation and performance of electronic music and sonic art.
This seminar is designed to build skills in engaging with primary materials and secondary literature in critical music studies. Engagement with a shared topic at the outset of the semester provides the context from which each student fashions an independent project. Oral presentations and active discussion are integral to the course.
This seminar explores the history of formalized, institutional music education in Europe and North America, focusing on the Middle Ages to the present. Topics include monastic and cathedral schools; conservatories and their roots in orphanages and vocational schools; music programs in pre-school, K-12, and higher ed (including Mount Holyoke); approaches to music within disability education; formal training in jazz, popular, traditional, and experimental musics; and the politics of degrees and accreditation. Through critical reading of primary sources, we trace the political and cultural work of music education, and how it reinforces aesthetic ideologies and systems of power and access.
An in-depth exploration of music and animation from the silent era to the digital age. We will draw on film-music theoretical and critical approaches to analyzing the interaction of music and image in shorts and feature films by studios like Warner Brothers, Disney, Pixar, and Ghibli, television shows, video games, music videos, and experimental animation. Our focus will be on audio-visual media that thematizes music and music-making, from Visual Music and Silly Symphonies to Mamoru Hosoda's Belle and the video game Guitar Hero. Final projects can range from critical-analytical papers and video essays to original audio-visual creative work.
In this seminar, we encounter foundational texts, methodologies, and case studies in the field of Disability Studies in Music. Grounded in a music-historical approach (but incorporating other music studies methods), we trace how musicking across a range of time periods and traditions both represents and constructs the cultures, policies, and tropes of bodymind difference and normativity. We center music, performance, and scholarship by disabled individuals and collectives, and emphasize the intersectional nature of disability justice, while also interrogating ableism in the music industry and the academy, as well as our own embodied positionalities as music makers, scholars, and consumers.
Designed for music and non-music majors, this advanced seminar examines core theoretical and methodological issues in ethnomusicology and the debates that have shaped its practice since its origins in the early twentieth century as comparative musicology. Drawing on musical traditions from different parts of the world and supplemented by workshops conducted by visiting professional musicians, the course explores the interdisciplinary approaches that inform how ethnomusicologists study the significance of music "in" and "as" culture. Topics covered will include ethnographic methods, the intersection of musicological and anthropological perspectives, the political significance of musical hybridity, applied ethnomusicology, and sound studies.
Fall and Spring. Credits: 1 - 8 Restrictions: Contact instructor for independent study declaration form and signatures.Instructor permission required.
Source: Mount Holyoke College's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
