45 courses with the subject MUS, 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.
MUS 100FMColloquium: Topics in Music-Fundamentals of Music4
Topics of MUS 100 especially designed for those with no previous background in music. They emphasize class discussion and written work, which consists of either music or critical prose as appropriate to the topic. Open to all students, but particularly recommended for first-year students and sophomores. An introduction to music notation and to principles of musical organization, including scales, keys, rhythm and meter. Limited to beginners and those who did not place into MUS 110. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}
An introduction to music history that combines a close study of music from the Western classical tradition with research methodology and an orientation to the discipline of musicology. Organized by genres and concepts, the class looks at classical music as both a repertoire and an object of cultural study. In addition to covering a range of works, the course addresses their production, performance, and reception through a study of their social and political context, and raises questions of power, representation, and patronage. Students also examine their own ideas about the role of the artist, what it means to be a musician, and the social future of this music. Students have the chance to do original research on a piece or topic of their choice and get a foundation in the College’s scholarly resources, especially the holdings at Josten Library and Special Collections. {A}{H}
This course focuses on connecting music theory concepts to musical experience. Ever wondered why certain harmonies seem to grab you by the ears? How do chord progressions work? This course provides an introduction to diatonic harmony in a range of tonal styles, including classical music and popular music. Students learn to apply technical theory knowledge flexibly and creatively to analysis, composition, and performance. Discussions include harmonic function, voicing and voice leading, dissonance treatment, non-chord tones, texture, cadences, and phrase structure. Course includes a required aural skills lab section (50 minutes per week). Prerequisite: MUS 100 or by placement test. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}
This course explores different approaches to the study of music as a cultural phenomenon. The course considers basic questions, such as: Why is music so often at the center of one's most profound personal and social experiences? Why is music a fundamental means of connecting with one's lives, communities and the wider world? Through in-depth reading and in-class discussion, students study the institutions of music (concerts, recording studios) and the varied practices of music making (classical, popular, amateur, professional) in order to construct a picture of the musical worlds and to understand what they say about society. {A}{S}
Popular music is deeply embedded in aspects of everyday life in the United States and can both reflect and resist pervasive notions regarding identity. But what is popular music, and what is its role in American culture? What makes music popular? What do people listen for when they listen to popular music? This course explores these questions and more as students study the history and development of popular music with a focus on music in the United States during the twentieth century. The course examines various genres and styles, including pop, rock, and soul, from a musical analytical perspective, as well as a social and cultural perspective. Students listen critically to popular music in order to better understand how it might reflect, shape, and/or challenge prevailing notions of American identity. {A}
This course focuses on connecting music theory concepts to musical experience. What effect to chromatic chords have in a composition? Why are some key changes so striking and others very subtle and smooth? This course covers intermediate diatonic and chromatic harmony in a range of tonal styles, including classical music and popular music. Students learn to apply technical theory knowledge flexibly and creatively to analysis, composition, and performance. Discussions include harmonic sequences, embellishing chords, applied dominants, modulation, modal mixture, augmented sixth chords and tritone substitution, other chromatic harmonies, and form. This course includes a required aural skills lab section (50 minutes per week). Prerequisite: MUS 110 or by placement test. Enrollment limited to 18. {A}
In this course, students evaluate the assumptions and foundations of Western music theory, primarily under the critical guidance of feminist theory. Tonal theory is often a routine part of undergraduate music study. What are the goals and criteria of this kind of analysis? While critically examining Western music theory’s intellectual values, students develop approaches to analysis that are responsive, in a variety of ways, to queer, feminist and antiracist thought. Through readings and listening assignments, students consider various challenges to the fiction of objectivity in music analysis, including embodiment, subjecthood and identity, and the mediating force of language and concepts. Prerequisites: MUS 110. Enrollment limited to 18. {A}
This course considers connections between human movement and music from the perspective of performance, analysis, history and cognition. Discussions include music and gesture, music performance, the role of the body in listening, and the co-constitutive relationship between music and dance. Students develop a deeper awareness of music’s fundamentally embodied nature and learn about a variety of different ways in which movement-music interaction has historically shaped artistic practices. Course readings address a range of different styles including Western classical music, modernist and avant garde music, Hip hop, pop, country, gospel, West African music, Salsa and Gamelan. Enrollment limited to 18. {A}
MUS 220PBTopics in World Music-The Power of Black Music4
The course focuses on the musics of Africa and the African diaspora through the lens of ethnomusicology. Concentrating on selected countries, including Benin, 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 examines the global dimensions and resonances of Africanist musical aesthetics as enabled historically and sustained through ongoing transatlantic exchanges between Africa and the African diaspora. The course also explores the issues of representation and identity in iconic works like Black Is King & Lemonade by Beyoncé. Other topics include the adaptation of hip-hop in Africa and the phenomenal popularity of West African Afrobeats in the United States and globally. Workshops conducted by visiting professional musicians and discussions on the instructor's ethnographic research in West Africa, Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. Enrollment limited to 40. {A}{S}
Each musical tradition is best explained and understood by its own system of theory. This course introduces four musical traditions and their corresponding theories: Tuvan Throat Singing, Dagomba Dance Drumming, Javanese Gamelan, and Hindustani classical music. Topics include theory fundamentals, listening methods, compositional approaches and aesthetics. Learning about these traditions opens doors to new modes of listening and to hearing familiar music in a brand new way.
How have social justice movements used music to mobilize people to fight for equality and rights? How have anti-democratic movements used music for reactionary ends? What is the role of music in sustaining—or eroding—democracies? This class examines a range of U.S. and global case studies, including Black Lives Matter, the abortion wars, global protest movements, and music and urban redevelopment. Through the study of national anthems, resistance songs like “Fight the Power,” and by examining the sounds of protest itself, students practice critical listening and reflect on how sound and music can press for social change--for better or worse. Students look at the role of music in democratic processes, the importance of music for belonging and citizenship, and whether and how music itself is significant to political participation. Prerequisites: MUS 102 or MUS 202. Enrollment limited to 18. {A}
Basic techniques of composition, including melody, simple two-part writing and instrumentation. Analysis of representative literature. No previous composition experience required. Prerequisite: MUS 110 or equivalent. {A}
Through streaming, radio, television, film, online media, public and private social spaces, and more, both artists and listeners use popular music to construct, perform, and assert their queer and trans identities. This course examines shifting conceptions of queer and trans identities and how they are constructed through, reflected in, and challenged by music in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. Discussions include: early blues; disco; women’s music; queercore and punk; and contemporary sapphic pop. Students create a zine as their final project. Weekly assignments include readings and listening. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}
In this course, students learn to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as an efficient tool to approach accuracy in lyric diction. Choral and solo singers must frequently perform music in languages that they do not speak, and therefore often struggle to sing with accurate pronunciation. IPA is a set of orthographic characters, almost entirely based on the Roman alphabet, that standardizes phonetics across most major languages. Prerequisite: MUS 952, MUS 953, or individual voice performance lessons must be taken concurrently. Enrollment limited to 20.
MUS 251Divas, Queens and Spectacle: A History of Opera4
This course offers an introduction to opera from the 16th to the 21st centuries, with an emphasis on gender performance, virtuosity and the unique history of opera performance at Smith College. Earlier works include Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Handel’s Rodelinda, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Verdi’s Aida, while more modern and contemporary operas include Strauss’s Salome and Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour du Loin. {A}{H}
In the last five decades, hip hop has become a dominant force in American and global popular music. Originating in the street culture of the Bronx in the 1970s, hip hop is a multifaceted cultural movement that has influenced almost all aspects of American culture. This course explores the musical expressions of hip hop, especially rap, within their cultural and historical contexts. Taking a largely chronological approach, this course focuses on the development and major trends in rap as they intersect with social and political movements at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course examines important topics in rap and hip hop music, including issues surrounding race, gender, sexuality, disability, and geopolitics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
What counts as music? Who decides? Can anyone make music? This course raises these and other questions by focusing on experimental music. The course explores the history and practice of experimental music, focusing on text, graphic and other forms of notation. The course also looks at the history of experimental music in performance and makes in-class performances of several key pieces. Through reading and practice, the course asks questions about musical authority, skill and even failure, and the role of institutions in shaping musical ideas. {A}{H}
This seminar is a practicum on songwriting. Through weekly creative assignments, in-class workshops and listening, students develop and strengthen their skills as musicians, performers and lyricists. Students try several songwriting and compositional techniques, and create and finalize work to be presented in a final concert. Students should have a basic working knowledge of music notation and theory, including harmonic analysis. Prerequisites: MUS 110 or equivalent. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}
This course considers various kinds of writing--from daily journalism and popular criticism to academic monographs and scholarly essays--that concern the broad history of music. Via regular writing assignments and group discussions of substance and style, students have opportunities to improve the mechanics, tone and range of their written prose. Required of senior majors; open to others with instructor permission. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}
Prerequisite: One course in composition. May be repeated for credit. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}
Introduction to musique concrète, analog synthesis, digital synthesis and sampling through practical work, assigned reading and listening. Enrollment limited to 8. Instructor permission required. {A}
In the history of Western music, world music, American music, composition and digital music, or music theory and analysis. For juniors and seniors. Instructor permission required.
Exploration and coaching of varied repertory for duos and small ensembles. May be repeated for credit. Open to instrumental students. Instructor permission required. {A}
Introduction to the art of conducting. This course examines philosophical and practical aspects of the modern conductor’s role. Discussions include a musical gestural vocabulary, baton technique and score study/internalization of the printed page. May be repeated for credit. Prior music performance experience and study of Western music theory is highly recommended. Instructor permission required. {A}
This is a group ensemble course focused on violin playing at the beginner level. Students learn how to perform with proper technique in a group setting on violin as well as how to read music. Listening assignments highlight the versatility of violin playing throughout various time periods and musical styles. Prerequisite: One topic of MUS 100 (may be concurrent.) Enrollment limited to 8. Instructor permission required.
This is a group ensemble course intended as a continuation of MUS 904 at an intermediate level. Classroom activities include group warm ups and drills of the basic building blocks of music theory such as scales, rhythms, and sight reading, in addition to repertoire interests of the students enrolled. Students learn how to actively listen to one another while playing independent parts in a group setting. Students discuss and put into practice the various elements of collaborating through chamber music. Listening assignments highlight the versatility of violin playing across genres and throughout many time periods. In addition to the 100-minute weekly class meetings, students are expected to spend 4 hours devoted to individual practice and listening assignments per week. Prerequisite: One topic of MUS 100 and MUS 904. Enrollment limited to 8.
This course is an introduction to basic keyboard skills for beginner pianists. Students develop technique and music-reading skills through solo repertoire and ensemble playing. Applied music theory such as major and minor scales, keyboard harmony and improvisation is also explored. Repeatable for credit. Prerequisite: MUS 100. Enrollment limited to 8. Instructor permission required.
Reserved for seniors who have been approved for the Music Major with a Focus in Performance. No early registration. Credits: 8, at the completion of two semesters. Audition required. Department permission required. {A}
This class is designed for students with little to no musical experience. In this course, students develop a sustainable singing technique, expand their range and learn the basics of reading sheet music. Repertoire is selected based on student abilities and interests and has in the past included vocal jazz, classical choral pieces and folksongs. Interested students should email the instructor with a description of your musical interests and experience (if any). May be repeated once for credit. S/U only. Instructor permission required. {A}
Formed in 1885, the Smith College Glee Club performs annually at Commencement and Christmas Vespers, on Family Weekend, for Autumn Serenade and at college events including Opening Convocation and Rally Day. The Glee Club selects music from a diverse repertoire, including major works for treble voices, jazz, contemporary, folk music of the U.S. and from international traditions. Guest choirs from such universities as Harvard, Rutgers, Cornell, Michigan and Virginia regularly come to campus to collaborate on a major work. Auditions for Glee Club are normally held during orientation and in the first two weeks of classes in both semesters. S/U only. Instructor permission required. {A}
Members of the Glee Club are eligible to audition for the highly selective Smith College Chamber Singers. The internationally known Chamber Singers have performed throughout the world since 1951. Touring normally every two years, the program provides financial assistance enabling all members to travel regardless of financial need. Auditions for Chamber Singers are held during orientation, in the first two weeks of classes in the fall semester and, occasionally, before the spring semester. S/U only. Instructor permission required. {A}
A symphony orchestra open to Smith and Five College students. The orchestra gives at least one concert each semester and performs at annual events such as Family Weekend and Christmas vespers. S/U only. Instructor permission required. {A}
One concert per semester. Open (subject to space) to Smith and Five College students, faculty and staff. No prior experience necessary. S/U only. Instructor permission required. {A}
The jazz ensemble performs at least one concert per semester. Favoring traditional big band instrumentation and performing a variety of jazz styles, the ensemble is open to Smith and Five College students, faculty and staff (space permitting) with all levels of music training. Prior jazz experience is recommended but not required. S/U only. Instructor permission required. {A}
At least one concert per semester. Open to Smith and Five College students, faculty and staff with prior instrumental experience. S/U only. Instructor permission required. {A}
The choir performs at the Family Weekend Montage concert, the annual Advent Dinner for the Roman Catholic community, Christmas Vespers and the second semester Spring Ring. In addition, the choir occasionally performs in off-campus community concerts. S/U only. Enrollment limited to 15. Instructor permission required. {A}
This course introduces students to the modern Chinese ensemble and a variety of Chinese music styles. The course is designed to be hands-on and experiential, encouraging students to explore the basic ideas of Chinese music and culture through rehearsals, practices and performances. At least one concert per semester. S/U only. Enrollment limited to 18. Audition required. Instructor permission required. {A}
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 four 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. S/U only. Enrollment limited to 25.
