140 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.
This four-week course fulfills the requirement of basic pitch, rhythm, and score-reading skills needed for some introductory courses and 2000-level courses with prerequisites.
Have you ever wondered: is there music in outer space? what is music's deep history? how do we know music when we hear it? why does it make us want to dance? does it also make us civilized? and how do cultural, technological, and economic forces shape why we listen, when we listen, and what we listen to? Elements of Music offers the opportunity to think about all these questions (and more) through a wide variety of hands-on musical activities: experimenting with instruments, recording and manipulating sounds from the world around us, examining medieval musical books, dancing the Twist, sweatin' to the Oldies, playing samba, improvising, singing, and above all, listening to music from around the world. (MUSIC-MT)
This course is designed to develop and strengthen your fundamental musical skills through embodied music interaction. You will compose, improvise, listen, and perform. You will use fundamental musical materials such as chords, melodies, and rhythms, and learn to notate music with accepted systems and describe it with appropriate terminologies. Using your voice, the keyboard, and other instruments, you will stimulate your creativity, refine your listening skills, and put your ideas into practice. The course will address music-making from a diverse set of cultures and traditions, and the skills you acquire will be transferable to a wide range of applications. (MUSIC-MT)
A self-contained introduction to functional tonality and related ideas found in jazz, rock, other popular forms, and traditional folk genres. Fundamentals of pitch (e.g., melody, harmony, temperament, voice leading) and time (rhythm and form) are examined through diverse musical examples, from the 17th century Western European canon to Haitian roots music to blues. Concepts ranging from counterpoint to clave are analyzed on their own terms. (MUSIC-MT)
A hands-on, half-semester (7 weeks) course on fundamental techniques for recording and live music production. Students will learn best practices for sound engineering, studio recording, and live performance production using various analog and digital hardware and software tools. (MUSIC-MT)
This course offers an introduction to the history and culture of Western art music, commonly known as classical music. While sketching an overview of important works, events, places, figures, and movements from the medieval period up to the present day, the course will focus on providing students with the knowledge, vocabulary, and listening skills required to locate themselves in relation to this vast and diverse body of music. No previous musical experience is required. (MUSIC-HC)
This course is for anyone who listens to music or plays music and wonders what's happening in your brain that makes you feel the way you do. Starting with the music each of you knows and loves-the soundtrack to your life-we'll tackle questions like: what is the relationship between speech and music? Do animals have music, too? How does the brain process aspects of music, including rhythm, melody, harmony, and form? Why does some music trigger an emotional response? What does it mean to say that music is an embodied behavioral act? What is the relationship between music and memory? Through lectures, discussions, experiments, compositions, recording technologies, student presentations/performances and writing assignments we'll explore how/why you've chosen the particular tunes on the soundtrack of your life, and how your brain processes musical thoughts and experiences. (MUSIC-HC)
This course provides students with the opportunity to devote their Spring Break to a marine conservation effort on Cape Cod. The class will travel to Provincetown, Massachusetts to collaborate with the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) on their annual Outer Cape Clean Up and Ghost Gear Removal Program. Students will learn about acoustic communication in marine mammals and participate in a deep exploration of marine habitat and anthropogenic environmental impact as part of a community-engaged experience. Students will work with CCS on a coordinated debris clean up effort; learn from CCS scientists, conservationists, and commercial fishermen about the complex network of issues impacting marine conservation on Cape Cod; and ultimately collaborate on a multi-media creative intervention to share with the public. (MUSIC-HC)
This course examines the development and cultural significance of rock music from its origins in blues, gospel, and Tin Pan Alley up to alternative rock and hip hop. The course concludes with the year 2000. (MUSIC-HC)
(Intro) To Black Music will introduce students to a multitude of Black musical artists across a range of styles and genres - from the blues of Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson to the contemporary stylistic experimentation of Doechii, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyonc? as well as to writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Ralph Ellison who help us better understand the sound and significance of their performances. Students will be expected to engage the dynamic innovation, cultural development, and deep attunements ever-active in the rhythms and melodies of Black social life through critical listening and analysis. In doing so this class will broaden students? musical and cultural horizons and help students situate Black diasporic music making in the 20th and 21st centuries within a broader context of racial capitalism, commodification, global networks of exchange, and the artistic pathways forged from legacies of joy, sorrow, pleasure, and resistance. (MUSIC-HC)
This course explores the breadth of music in contemporary Asia, with a focus on traditional and popular musics from East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) and Indonesia. Hands-on instruction in gamelan (Indonesia's most prominent form of traditional music) complements a survey of East Asian instruments and forms provides a glimpse into traditional aesthetics as well as an introduction to fundamental musical concepts. Presentations on historical topics provide background to understanding the spectacular rise of popular genres, and a foundation for student explorations of specific cases. The course thus approaches music both music as sound and practice, and as a lens for examining the myriad social and cultural forces that shape it, and that are shaped by it. (MUSIC-HC)
A composition-based introduction to computer hardware and software for digital sound and media. Fundamentals of audio, synthesis, sequencing, and other techniques for electronic music production. Each student creates several short compositions. (MUSIC-MT)
Over the centuries, artists in a wide variety of media have employed many approaches to the creative process, ranging from the philosophical to the mechanical to the virtual. This course unravels some of the mysteries going on inside software used for art and music. It looks at ways of breaking things apart and sampling and ways of putting things together and resynthesizing, and explores ideas for creation. This course does not teach software packages for creating art and music. The course complements ART 2701 and MUSIC 1421. (MUSIC-MT)
This course explores the physics of musical sound. How and what do our ears hear? How does that determine the kinds of sounds we find pleasant and not so pleasant? How is sound generated by strings, pipes, and plates, and what determines the characteristics - pitch, timbre, attack, consonance, or dissonance - of that sound? How do the major families of musical instruments (string, wind, reed, brass, percussion) and specific examples (violin, guitar, piano, flute, oboe, trumpet, chimes, pipe organ) work, and how does that affect how they are played and the sounds they produce? How do we generate sound when we sing, and how does that vary in different kinds of singing? What makes for a good concert hall or listening space? These are explained using physical and mathematical concepts including vibrations, standing waves, harmonic series, beats, spectra, and logarithms, and illustrated using demonstrations, audio clips, and musical selections from a wide variety of genres. This course is a Writing In The Majors course: both science writing and physics problem-solving skills are developed through weekly assignments. Student activities include hands-on investigations of musical instruments and field trips. Students can expect to gain facility with physical and mathematical ideas having broad applicability; with music theory and psychoacoustics; and with their combined application to musical sound and how it is generated. At the level of The Science of Sound by Rossing, Moore, and Wheeler. (MUSIC-MT)
This First-Year Writing seminar provides the opportunity to write extensively about music's place in our world. Topics vary by section. TermTopicInstructorFall, SpringThe Story of a SongN. Vigilante.FallAnimal Music: From Cicadas to WhalesA. Lewandowski. (MUSIC-HC)
Punk Culture-comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts-represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary. (MUSIC-HC)
Study of the foundations of tonal music as manifested primarily in the Western literate tradition, also incorporating examples from various vernacular idioms. The course combines modern pedagogical methods with the study of historical sources and focuses on active learning at the keyboard. Topics to be covered include rudiments such as scales and triads; melodic and harmonic principles; voice-leading strategies and schemata; species counterpoint; improvisation, including techniques of embellishment; rhythm, meter, and gesture. During sections, the concepts and skills introduced in lecture will be practiced at the keyboard as well as vocally. Other section activities include elements of musicianship (aural skills, intervallic production and identification, rhythmic accuracy and fluency, etc.); transcription; sight singing; and score reading. (MUSIC-MT)
Theory, Materials, and Techniques II surveys tonal music as conceived and practiced throughout late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. The course combines modern pedagogical methods with the study of relevant historical sources and incorporates active learning at the keyboard. Topics to be covered include the analysis of form and genre; advanced techniques of modulation; transformational theory and other approaches to the configuration of diatonicism and chromaticism; and the relationship of words and music in nineteenth-century song. During section meetings, the concepts and skills introduced in lecture will be practiced at the keyboard as well as vocally. Other topics to be covered in sections include advanced aural skills; sight singing; score reading; and the improvisation of preludes. (MUSIC-MT)
Songwriting introduces students to the practice of songwriting through workshop-formatted classes. We will explore the ingredients of song (lyrics, melody, delivery, harmony, rhythm, form, texture, timbre, and arrangement) through analysis, composition, recording technologies, performance, and concert reports. Proficiency on one or more musical instruments is required. Songwriting can be taken as a stand-alone course or as part of the Songwriting sequence with Collaborative Songwriting. (MUSIC-MT)
Collaborative Songwriting introduces students to the practice of songwriting through workshop-formatted classes. We will explore the ingredients of song (lyrics, melody, delivery, harmony, rhythm, form, texture, timbre, and arrangement) in diverse collaborative contexts through analysis, composition, recording technologies, performance, and concert reports. Proficiency on one or more musical instruments is required. Collaborative Songwriting can be taken as a stand-alone course or as part of the Songwriting sequence. (MUSIC-MT)
Introduction to the collaborative creation of pieces of music, whether composed, improvised, or some combination of the two. The specific focus in terms of genre, style, and model is determined by the instructor, and may encompass formats as diverse as memorized melodies in song form, roughly defined structures and instructions, and fully notated scores. In all cases, material will be developed through workshop sessions, and will be performed publicly and/or recorded. (MUSIC-MT)
Music plays an essential role in identity formation, social experience, emotional regulation, interpersonal bonding, caregiving, and the creation of spiritual meaning across all human cultures. This course surveys the ways in which music interacts with our minds and bodies, focusing on core theoretical concepts such as pitch, timing, and expectation, but also on the cultural history of states such as trance or flow, and the implementation of musical joy and mimesis in cultural productions. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to music by combining approaches from musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory with sound studies, acoustics, and cognitive science. It is designed to be stylistically agnostic, and no prior experience with any particular form of music is required. (MUSIC-HC)
This course introduces students to the study of music as an expression of history and culture by examining the ways in which music creates meaning, knowledge, archives, and identities. Musical examples will be drawn from a broad range of styles, chronological periods, and geographical locations; and students will engage with live performance as well as various forms of recorded music and mediated performance. Along with considering music as sound, the course will examine different modalities of writing about music-journalistic, academic, and creative-and we will think about how these musical texts, and those that the students produce, function to situate music as discourse. The course will develop critical thinking, writing, and presentation skills. (MUSIC-HC)
Born within weeks of one another in 1685, their birthplaces less than one hundred miles apart in the forests of central Germany, George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach composed extraordinary music spanning the gamut of human experience and grappling with fundamental human concerns (love, death, duty, happiness) with an expressive power that has never been surpassed. Handel was one of the great cosmopolitans of the eighteenth century and his life and works offer a panorama of European baroque culture. Bach by contrast spent his entire life in the region of his birth; yet his music demonstrates a miraculous awareness of the greater world beyond Germany. In this course students will encounter vocal and instrumental masterpieces by each composer taken from opera, the church, the court, and the home; we will explore the meanings of these works in their own time and their continued vibrancy in the twenty-first century. (MUSIC-HC)
This course will survey the history and US political contexts of LGBTQ+ identities in popular music over three critical decades. We will cover the 1970s era of gay liberation and visibility with glam rock, first-wave punk, women?s music, and disco; the mainstreaming of queer sensibility in dance pop, new wave, and voguing in the neoliberal 1980s; and 1990s rise of queer theory, AIDS epidemic, ?don?t ask don?t tell,? and queer activism reflected in queercore, crypto-queer alternative rock, and coded music videos. We will also consider how these past expressive strategies are referenced and extended in later and current queer pop. (MUSIC-HC)
The organ is an interdisciplinary wonder where mechanics, architecture, acoustics, religion, philosophy, literature, as well as the musical arts and sciences meet. This course uses the organ to explore music's relation to technology, history and culture, and in turn traces the technical and mechanical mysteries, and expressive possibilities, of the 'King of Instruments' across its long history. Students will gain 1) an understanding of some key aspects of musical history and repertoire; 2) a sense for the historical relation between music and technology; 3) a new knowledge of (and enthusiasm for!) the organ; and 4) an insight into the ways in which musical instruments and the musical practice associated with them are cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. With a key focus on the music of J. S. Bach, as well as on the reception of Bach's music in the 19th and 20th centuries, topics include the mechanics of organ construction, the North German organ art and the toccata, virtuosity and the use of the feet, the symphonic organ in the 19th century, 20th-century experimentation with organ sound, the organ and film. The course combines lectures with sessions at the organs as well as regular organ recitals. No prior musical experience necessary, although those interested (and with some keyboard skills) will have the opportunity for an introduction to learning to play - with both hands and feet. (MUSIC-HC)
The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musical-and how in turn musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST, MUSIC-HC, PMA-HTC)
(MUSIC-HC)
What does it mean to have good taste in music? Where does the idea come from, and how has it changed historically? Who has the power to decide which music is good and which is terrible? What makes an expert? Does expertise mean anything in assessing the value of different musics? And how does aesthetic expertise interact with other systems of power and identity? Why do people love some genres and hate others? Why does a guilty pleasure involve guilt at all? How do we explain our most basic aesthetic attachments? We will examine these questions by reading and discussing texts by philosophers, historians, journalists, musicologists, and sociologists on taste and cultural authority. (MUSIC-HC)
This workshop in music journalism will sharpen your prose, your mind, and your tongue. We'll read the work of great journalists of the past and present who've written ardently and unforgettably about music - Joseph Addison, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, George Bernard Shaw, Paul Griffiths, Greil Marcus, Stanley Crouch, and Alex Ross, among others. Thus inspired, we'll dive into the vibrant musical scene of Cornell and beyond, each participant writing weekly pieces for the class blog, whose title and format will be determined by class members. In the course of the semester each student will accumulate a substantial portfolio of journalism and stroke a love of writing about music. (MUSIC-HC)
In this course students will analyze the development of black musical traditions from a diasporic perspective and extend their musical awareness beyond familiar timelines and geographies. The intention of this course is for students to develop a deeper understanding of black music composition, structure, and form by introducing higher-level musical language and grammar. This will include musical notation, rhythmic and harmonic analysis, part-writing, listening, and other skills that can facilitate a deeper engagement with black musical cultures. By the end of the course, students will develop their own theoretical interpretations of what unites and distinguishes black musical practices across time and space. (MUSIC-HC)
This course explores the breadth of music found in present day China, Japan, and Korea--from indigenous musical traditions, through adaptations of Western art music, up to the latest popular styles--as well as the presence of traditional East Asian musics outside East Asia, including right here at Cornell. In both cases, music offers a lens for examining the myriad social and cultural forces that shape it, and that are shaped by it. The course's academic focus on critical reading and listening, written assignments, and discussion is complemented by opportunities to engage directly with music, whether attending concerts or participating in workshops with student-led ensembles. Music majors may enhance this course with additional content and an extra credit by enrolling concurrently in MUSIC 3901. (ASIAN-SC, MUSIC-HC)
The course will focus on the music of the Beatles and their impact on American and British culture in the 1960s to the present day. Topics include considerations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and the media in their rise to fame; the influence of the counterculture, drugs, and other rock musicians, as well as Western and Indian classical music on their music and image; their perceived rivalry with the Rolling Stones; and their experimentation with recording technology. (MUSIC-HC)
This course combines hands-on instruction in gamelan, Indonesia's most prominent form of traditional music, and the academic study of the broader range of music found in contemporary Indonesia, including Western-oriented and hybrid popular forms. Students thus engage with music directly, and use it as a lens to examine the myriad social and cultural forces that shape it, and that are shaped by it. No previous knowledge of musical notation or performance experience necessary. (ASIAN-SC, MUSIC-HC)
This course surveys the broad range of music originating in Asia, from Arab maqam to Japanese gagaku, Mongolian khoomii to Carnatic solkattu. A primary goal is understanding what makes these musics distinct, in aspects such as pitch, time, timbre, organization, and how pieces of music are created and transmitted. In working towards this you will develop skills in critical listening and technical analysis, which we will also apply to identifying how traditional elements show up in contemporary genres, and what changes and what is retained when traditional genres are modernized. Complementing this theoretically-oriented work, we will also engage in music directly through vocal and rhythmic exercises, and hands-on instruction in Javanese gamelan.
This course critically examines the politics and ethics of knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences. It poses an expansive and complex question: how, by whom, and for whom is knowledge produced and to what ends? We will explore quantitative and qualitative research methods, theories of the archive and curation, and artistic and creative work as forms of knowledge production while centering questions of access across a range of categories, including but not limited to disability, language, geopolitical positioning, and neurodivergence. In a semester-long active learning project, students and faculty will collaboratively produce knowledge and disseminate it via the in-progress, open-access digital humanities platform Palestinian Pedagogy Network. (MUSIC-HC)
This course explores how first-generation American and immigrant musicians from the Caribbean and Latin America arranged and commodified the folk music of their countries for audiences in the United States. Whether for entertainment, as political protest, or as a way to understand themselves, artists like Harry Belafonte and Franz Casseus in the 1950s to Nathalie Joachim and Layla McCalla in recent years embraced the music of Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad for musical inspiration. We will first consider the nature of folk music as a repository for cultural heritage and then examine its relationship to other genres of music. We will listen to many albums and compose our own folk arrangements. Other course themes will include: transnationalism, hybridity, commercialism, cultural appropriation and social justice. (MUSIC-HC)
Since hip hop first emerged in the South Bronx nearly half a century ago, it has grown into a global movement. Youth around the world not only consume hip hop; they also create their own, adapting hip hop music, texts, dance, and visual culture to local realities. This course traces the ongoing connections between hip hop's roots in the cultural expression of marginalized African American and Latinx youth in the postindustrial urban United States, its contemporary relationship to US popular culture, and its routes around the globe, where diverse practitioners mobilize its beats, rhymes, and visual culture to address experiences of oppression and displacement, celebrate life, and agitate for social justice. (MUSIC-HC)
This course takes a selection of hit songs of the summer from the past fifty years as entry points into pivotal moments in U.S. history. Popular music not only reflects social issues; it also shapes public perception and at can fuel social change, from contexts ranging from the civil rights movement, to US imperialist projects, to the HIV/AIDs crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, movements like BlackLivesMatter and MeToo, and struggles for trans rights. (MUSIC-HC)
This course is a hybrid seminar/performance forum that combines scholarly exploration of hip hop musical aesthetics with applied performance. Students will engage in online and in-class discussions of hip hop musical aesthetics, contextualized historically, socially, and culturally through weekly reading and listening assignments. They will also devote significant time to creating and workshopping individual and collaborative musical projects. Formal musical training is not required, but students should have experience making music (instrumentalists, beat makers, lyricists, vocalists, beatboxers, etc.), and should have at least a basic familiarity with hip hop music. Students who wish to enroll in the course should contact the professor for more information. (MUSIC-MT)
A course exploring strategies and techniques for live musical performance and real-time, interactive sound manipulation with computers. (MUSIC-MT)
This course explores the tools and techniques used to score film, television, video games, and other forms of media. More importantly, the course critically examines the discourses surrounding media scoring, considering the narratives, histories, conventions, and ideologies that shape how music and sound function in audiovisual media. Students will create and re-score music and sound effects for selected scenes and games, developing skills in music composition, theory, and music production. Written work required involves critical analysis of soundtracks from mainstream media alongside international arthouse and experimental scenes. No Music background is required.
A hands-on introduction course to experimentation in sound composition. Our focus will be on the use of everyday sounds and materials in the context of musical composition. We will investigate the process of creating new work from the gathering of materials to extended forms of musical notation. We will experiment with creating, manipulating and transforming sounds using notations and guided improvisations to create forms of interacting, listening, musical textures, and structures. We will also explore notions of time, approaches to musical notation, and the symbolic representation of sound. As part of this course, we will study influential compositions and artworks from the 20th century to the present day, as starting points for discussions on form, concept, and compositional method. (MUSIC-MT)
In the second part of Shaping Sound - an introduction course to experimentation in sound, composition - we will continue to experiment with creating, manipulating, and transforming sounds. By using everyday sounds, materials, notations, and guided improvisations, we aim to create forms of interacting, listening, sonic textures, and structures. Through this process, we will question notions of sound perception and generate new forms of sonic knowledge. In a workshop environment, we will explore influential compositions and artworks from the 20th century to the present day, as starting points for discussions on form, concept, and artistic method. A larger project inspired by the works examined throughout the course can be presented as a composition, sound object, an installation, or any combination thereof. (MUSIC-MT)
(MUSIC-HC)
This course considers music and digital games in light of their playability. It aims to provide students with creative and critical frameworks for making sense of the diverse roles played by music in digital games as well as the ways in which playing digital games can be considered a musical activity. Focusing on games across an array of genres, the course introduces students to recent scholarship on digital games while prompting them to develop new modes of engagement with game music as creators and players. A background in music and/or game development is not required: the course?s materials and assignments can be approached in different ways depending on each student?s level of experience. (MUSIC-HC)
From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, Thinking Media offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data. (MUSIC-HC)
An introduction to fundamental jazz theory, technique, and applied skills. (MUSIC-MT)
Continuation of jazz theory, technique, and applied skills. (MUSIC-MT)
This course introduces fundamentals of conducting, including, but not limited to, gesture and movement; score reading, analysis, and interpretation; ear training; and historical practices. Students explore these topics in a variety of musical contexts, including orchestral, wind ensemble, choral, and mixed chamber ensembles. Classes are a mix of lectures, demonstrations, peer-to-peer learning activities, and frequent conducting experiences. (MUSIC-MT)
This course provides students with limited composition experience the essential skills to create original music. Students will explore 20th- and 21st-century techniques and repertoire, integrating these concepts into their creative process. The course also emphasizes developing attentive and critical listening habits, examining not only how sounds are produced and combined but also their deeper meanings and historical contexts. Students will engage with diverse compositional methods and styles, and various approaches to music notation. Coursework includes short readings and listening exercises, regular creative assignments, and a larger final composition. (MUSIC-MT)
Composer?s Toolbox II introduces undergraduate students to music composition through non-conventional approaches to sound organization and notation. The class explores composing with field recordings, the inclusion of improvisation, process music, experimental music production techniques, and sound art. There are no stylistic prescriptions in the class, and students are encouraged to blend different techniques. Coursework consists of in-depth repertoire analysis, short readings, listening assignments, regular creative exercises, and a final composition. The course is open to students with varying degrees of compositional experience. Students who identify as having limited or extensive experience in composition will find opportunities to expand their practice and engage with new methods. (Note: Composer?s Toolbox I is not a prerequisite.) (MUSIC-MT)
This course offers historical, critical, and cross-cultural perspectives on music as a cause, a symptom, and a treatment of madness. Why are there so many reports of uncontrollable singing and/or dancing from medieval Europe? Why, around 1800, were women regarded as particularly susceptible to the sounds of the glass harmonica? Did certain kinds of music really cause members of the Issawa brotherhood to burn themselves with red-hot coals? In each class meeting we will investigate a number of approaches to a given mental state in the light of readings by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, historians, disability studies, scholars and medico-scientific researchers. (MUSIC-HC)
What can we hear or even see in a sound? Can the sound of a voice conjure traces of a body? How does sound construct gender and race? In this course, we will consider how listening, voicing, and music-making operate as mechanisms of representation. We will pay particular attention to the work that sonic representations perform and their connections to systems of power and identity. From reggaet?nd Brazilian funk to voiceovers and machine listening, we will attune our ears to contemporary popular cultures in the Americas, listening closely to how they represent gender and race in relation to other social categories. No prior musical training is required. (MUSIC-HC)
This course surveys the histories, aesthetics, and politics of music and virtuality, focusing on contemporary manifestations of ?virtual music? since the 2010s. We will learn about how music is created, performed, and consumed in virtual environments, focusing specifically on questions of embodiment and identity. Case studies will include virtual and augmented reality concerts; musical performances in video games; virtual bands; and Web3/blockchain music. We will pay particular attention to the ties between virtual worlds, musical aesthetics, and queer and trans community building. Students will learn how to conduct digital musical ethnography and will complete participant observation-based final projects in a virtual music community. (MUSIC-HC)
In her pathbreaking text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman writes that young Black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise. This two-semester course endeavors to travel through those worlds using the cultural and musical forms of gospel and the blues as our compass. The first semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones and artists like Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between. (MUSIC-HC)
This course asks a deceptively simple question: what do we mean by “American music?” This class explores how the idea of American music was constructed, debated, and contested from the nineteenth century to the present. Rather than treating national identity as self-evident, the course asks by what criteria—and by whose authority—music has been claimed as American. Students will study historical and contemporary debates about folk music, art music, popular music, race, indigeneity, and cultural heritage, drawing from scholarly and journalistic sources. Through close reading, discussion, and short writing assignments, participants will learn to analyze nationalist discourse critically, developing tools to recognize how cultural identities are constructed, naturalized, and contested both within music and in broader political life.
This course will survey the influence of jazz across multiple forms, including literature, poetry, and film. This influence was often reciprocal; as writers, playwrights, filmmakers and poets sought to think with and through jazz, so too did jazz musicians engage with and take inspiration from other forms. Through our engagement with these multiple mediums, we will develop a broader understanding of the social and political context for this music and the unique affordances and challenges of cross-media scholarship. No prior knowledge of jazz is required; the course is designed to function as a novel (excuse the pun) way of introducing the genre. In addition to reading and watching various forms of media, we will be listening to music throughout. (MUSIC-HC)
How can music be both ephemeral and eternal, bound to time while floating free of it? This course will survey musical expressions of time across a wide array of histories and genres both within and outside of Western art music. Spanning case studies from Renaissance prolation canons to Javanese Gamelan and durational performance art to J Dilla, we will uncover the ways in which time is made audible and embodied through performance. In addition to analysis of scores and recordings, we will study texts on temporality found across music, sound, film, and performance studies. Students will be assessed through several short creative projects throughout the semester. Basic fluency with Western notation is recommended, but not required. (MUSIC-HC)
This course will examine how theorists, scientists, artists, and other audiences ask questions of sound and questions of blackness, as well as what those questions reveal about the listener. We will also consider how everyday practices of sounding and listening for blackness challenge and undermine preconceived notions of race, gender, sexuality, and individuality. The intention of this course is for students to develop a better understanding of how sound shapes our experience and understanding of the world. The course is interdisciplinary; we will draw on black studies and sound studies approaches to sound, speech, aurality, and musicality from contemporary and historical moments. (MUSIC-HC)
A course for students interested in composition and performance, Handmade Music is a practice-oriented composition course in which students will make music created to be performed by themselves and other members of the class, in compositions ranging from solo to small ensemble pieces. The course will culminate in the presentation of a selection of these compositions in a concert produced by the members of the class. Students will explore composition and performance as two manifestations of creation that meet in the same person or group, developing a historical and practical understanding of artists as part of their communities, and recognizing the way in which their environments shaped their practices. No previous musical training is required. (MUSIC-MT)
This course teaches students to create interactive multimedia performance systems using sensor data. With tools such as accelerometers, depth sensors, and microphones, students build responsive systems that translate gesture into real-time audiovisual output. Through weekly creative assignments, in-class listening sessions, and group critiques, students develop technical and conceptual skills through hands-on experimentation and reflection. A weekly journal analyzing interactive works discussed in class builds the critical vocabulary needed to visualize system designs, troubleshoot technical issues, and make informed creative decisions. The course culminates in an original interactive multimedia project on a topic of each student's choosing. No prior experience in music performance or creative programming is required.
Covering the basics of digital audio, bioacoustics, psychoacoustics and sound design, as they apply to theatre, film and music production. Students create soundscapes for text and moving image using ProTools software. (MUSIC-MT, PMA-DE)
Individual instruction in voice, organ, harpsichord, piano and fortepiano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and some brass and woodwind instruments to those students advanced enough to do college-level work in these instruments. For more information about individual instruction, see the section titled Musical Instruction. (MUSIC-PL)
Individual instruction in voice, organ, harpsichord, piano and fortepiano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and some brass and woodwind instruments to those students advanced enough to do college-level work in these instruments. For more information about individual instruction, see the section titled Musical Instruction. (MUSIC-PL)
Individual instruction in voice, organ, harpsichord, piano and fortepiano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and some brass and woodwind instruments to those students advanced enough to do college-level work in these instruments. For more information about individual instruction, see the section titled Musical Instruction. (MUSIC-PL)
A nationally renowned choral ensemble and vibrant student-driven organization specializing in repertoire for tenors and basses. Collaborates frequently with the Chorus to present mixed-voice repertoire and major works. Maintains a rigorous rehearsal and concert schedule and performs a wide variety of choral repertoire from throughout history and across the globe. Tours and records annually. (MUSIC-PL)
A nationally renowned choral ensemble and vibrant student-driven organization specializing in repertoire for tenors and basses. Collaborates frequently with the Chorus to present mixed-voice repertoire and major works. Maintains a rigorous rehearsal and concert schedule and performs a wide variety of choral repertoire from throughout history and across the globe. Tours and records annually. (MUSIC-PL)
This course provides comprehensive training designed for singers to enhance their musical skills, sight-reading abilities, and vocal technique. The Chorale functions as a performing group with a strong emphasis on cultivating vital proficiencies to an advanced standard, equipping students with the requisite musical groundwork essential for a lifelong in choral music. Open to Cornell's undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff members who share a passion for singing, the Chorale invites participation. An expedited audition process is mandatory to assess suitable ensemble placement. (MUSIC-PL)
Study and performance of Central Javanese gamelan, the best known traditional music of Indonesia. For more information see https://blogs.cornell.edu/gamelan/. (MUSIC-PL)
The Cornell Steel Band explores the wide variety of music for an orchestra of instruments fashioned from 55-gallon oil drums, and an engine room of non-pitched percussion. Interwoven into the focus on hands-on practice is reflection on the meanings of steel band, historically and in the present, in its native Trinidad and Tobago and here in the United States. Formal musical training is not necessary, though a sense of rhythm and a good ear are helpful. (MUSIC-PL)
Study and performance of classic and contemporary big band literature. Rehearsal once a week with one to two performances a semester. (MUSIC-PL)
This course is open to experienced rappers, beatmakers, and vocalists interested forging collaborative relationships with other students. Taking as a foundation hip-hop's relationship to social justice, each semester we will work together to plan and record an EP on a theme or keyword chosen as a group. We will construct and analyze playlists of inspirational material, identifying specific hip-hop compositional strategies for creating beats and rhymes on a theme, and will use these tools to create and workshop our own collaborative tracks in weekly meetings. (MUSIC-PL)
The Cornell Symphony Orchestra provides its members the opportunity to develop their artistry and enhance their knowledge of orchestral repertoire in a dynamic and engaging environment. Students perform a variety of repertoire that encompasses from the baroque to the 21st century through a range of symphonic activities: orchestral performances, composer and repertoire readings, educational and community outreach events, tours, and collaborations with faculty and guest artists. (MUSIC-PL)
The Cornell Wind Symphony unites student musicians in an ensemble dedicated to the study and performance of emerging and traditional wind repertoire. The Cornell Wind Symphony unites student musicians in an ensemble dedicated to the study and performance of emerging and traditional wind repertoire. Full details and audition instructions will be posted on www.cuwinds.com as they become available. (MUSIC-PL)
The Cornell Percussion Ensemble studies and performs conducted and un-conducted percussion chamber music from the rapidly expanding repertoire. Utilizing the stylistic and sonic variety that is unique to the medium, the ensemble performs a variety of composers and styles, including pieces composed within the past few years. Members of the ensemble will develop strategic listening and communication techniques through the study of chamber music while advancing their interpretative and technical skills. The ensemble performs mostly notated music, and players should have experience with reading advanced music notation. Prior experience with percussion instruments and advanced skill in reading music notation is required. Participants must demonstrate skills to instructor via video, audio recordings, or in-person audition before receiving code to enroll. (MUSIC-PL)
The Music Improvisation Ensemble provides students with the opportunity to explore the elements of music from an improviser's perspective. This ensemble is open to any level of musician. An audition is required at the beginning of the semester simply as a means of introduction. Please contact instructor Annie Lewandowski for more information: apl72@cornell.edu. (MUSIC-PL)
Fall 2022: Music for Saxophones: This coached chamber music course focuses on the performance of standard and emerging saxophone quartet (SATB) and sextet (sopranino through bass) music. Instruction emphasizes rehearsal skills, leadership, and collaborative methods; familiarization with the repertory; musical analysis through performance; and the development of a historically informed, musically unified, interpretation. The course will conclude with a concert featuring music prepared throughout the semester in collaboration with the Ithaca College saxophone quartet. For additional information contact James Spinazzola, jms862@cornell.edu. (MUSIC-PL)
Intended primarily for music majors, this option allows students enrolled in an approved 1000- or 2000-level 3-credit music history course to pursue independent research and writing projects. Students will study various topics in music history at a more advanced level through supplementary reading, discussion, and writing, by arrangement with the professor.
Co-requisite for new Cornell Chorus and Glee Club members, based on audition, and open to all students regardless of participation in an ensemble. This course provides a comprehensive perspective of choral music designed for singers to enhance their musical skills, foundational and advanced approaches for sight-reading abilities, aural skills, vocal technique, and appreciation of different styles of choral music. Recommended for singers at all levels wishing to improve musicianship skills. (MUSIC-PL)
A course for advanced undergraduate composers (by permission with a portfolio audition) seeking individual music composition instruction. In addition to individual meetings, composers may have opportunities for the reading and/or performance of their work.
This course is designed to build on topics covered in The Art of Conducting (MUSIC 3122) and introduce concepts related to score study, rehearsal techniques, and advanced nonverbal communication. Competency with traditional beat patterns, a fundamental vocabulary of gestures, and the ability to read staff notation are assumed. Students will conduct orchestral, band, choral, and mixed chamber ensembles. (MUSIC-MT)
A study of arranging, composition, and orchestration technique by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sammy Nestico, Thad Jones, Horace Silver, and various members of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Work consists of three substantial arrangements for small, medium, and large ensemble with bi-weekly assignments. Arrangements are recorded by members of the jazz ensemble and submitted as a portfolio at the end of the semester. (MUSIC-MT)
(MUSIC-HC)
This seminar explores musical, aesthetic, physiological, and mythical concepts of touch in relation to music. Focusing on the relationship between the body of the musician and musical sound, we will develop an interdisciplinary history of musical touch from the late 18th century to the present. How are sensibility and sympathy, performance and material culture, instruments and bodies, figured in terms of touch and touching? Exploring haptics, disability studies, new musical instruments, music cognition, physiology, theory of listening, topics include the clavichord as tactile revelation of genius; the glass harmonica, blindness, and physiology of the nervous system; technologies of touch in the 19th century; the fetishization of the disciplined hand; the absent or fantastic touch and its relation to music-making at early 20th-century electronic instruments, especially the Theremin; deafness, musical vibration and wearables; contemporary touch-sensitive keyboarding. Readings include C. P. E. Bach on keyboard practice, Diderot on sympathetic vibration, German romantic fiction, contemporary theory of sensibility, physiology, and new materialism; composers include Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, MacPherson and many unknowns. Visual materials include representations of the sensing body, hand casts and photographs, and 'hand-fetish' films such as the 1924 expressionist classic The Hands of Orlac. Our aim will be to develop a broader understanding of music culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to recognize connections between keyboard culture, histories of the body, and the fine arts. Students will refine critical reading and research skills, and practice the art of developing imaginative research questions. (MUSIC-HC)
(MUSIC-HC)
Based on the holdings of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, this course will stage encounters with organs, clavichords, harpsichords, pianos, and synthesizers. In approaching them, we will treat the term ?keyboard? as both a noun and a verb: like ?skateboard? or ?snowboard,? it can represent both an object and ways of interacting with it. Students will situate each instrument within geographical and historical ecologies that acknowledge the origins of its materials, the labor that brought it into being, the play that has animated it, the repertoire that has sustained it, and the people it has connected. Over the course of the semester, each student will define and pursue a substantial research project based on one or more instruments. (MUSIC-HC)
Using Cornell University Library?s extensive archival collections on punk, hip hop, electronic music and EDM, this course will introduce students to the practice and theory of archival research on these music subcultures from the 1970s to early 2000s. Through a focus on primary sources, students will engage directly with the history of these genres and develop the critical skills for evaluating and working with different types of artifacts (including correspondence, photographs, flyers and posters, business records, recordings, contemporaneous newspapers and magazines). The course will also consider topics such as: ethical approaches to working with communities of living people; the sustainability and futurity of community controlled and institutional archives; and how archivists and archival repositories identify, appraise, acquire, describe, and provide public access to materials. Guest speakers may include musicians who have placed their personal archives at Cornell, and pop music journalists and biographers who have used the archives in their work, and other curators and community archivists. Open to graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Some familiarity with popular music history from 1960-2000 is required. (MUSIC-HC)
(MUSIC-HC)
This seminar serves as a rigorous introduction to the scholarly study of music and sound. We will read classic books and articles as well as more recent influential contributions, concentrating on scholarship in ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and sound studies. We will seek to understand how scholars have analyzed musical works of art, social practices of music making, and cultures of listening in different historical periods and in different parts of the world. Our goal will be to develop a general understanding of the current state of the field. (MUSIC-HC)
This seminar examines the role of ethnographic writing in musical anthropology, exploring how ethnographic knowledge is produced, authorized, and consumed. It critically interrogates ethnography's generic conventions, probing its relation to travel writing, memoir, poetry, and fiction, and engaging narrative, experimental, reflexive and auto- ethnography. Drawing on performance studies, it considers the textuality of musical events and weighs the particular challenges, possibilities, and limitations of writing ethnographically about sound, music, and movement. In doing so, it explores the temporality and spatiality of ethnographic writing, engages related critiques of the so-called ethnographic present, and considers issues of representation and subjectivity. Students will approach these questions through critical readings in anthropology and ethnomusicology as well as through weekly workshopping of their own writing. (MUSIC-HC)
This course offers a unique opportunity to engage in a dynamic, multi-sited exploration of music production, cultural exchange, and technological collaboration. This course is open to songwriters, performers, producers, and engineers who want to collaborate remotely with peers in Rwanda to produce and showcase original compositions, fostering a rich cross-cultural dialogue through music. By integrating theoretical knowledge with practical experience, students will increase their ability to create and collaborate in the recording studio, as well as cultivating different strategies for long-distance collaboration on musical projects. (MUSIC-HC)
What is a sounding object or musical instrument, and how does human culture shape these unique human-made material sources of sound? In a workshop environment, students will explore how instruments and sound objects can be modified or bent to produce yet more sounds. By using ideas from music, sound art, and sound studies and being inspired by visiting instrument makers, we will explore what instruments are and could be. Students, working alone or in collaboration, will design and build (which could include a conceptual reworking) their own instrument or sounding object that they will learn how to operate and modify to make new sounds. (MUSIC-MT)
Making Sound Futures is a transdisciplinary, transformative, hands-on studio course that nurtures curiosity and promotes experimentation, intuitive decision-making, and risk-taking. Embracing imperfection and uncertainty, we will construct sonic instruments to facilitate self-discovery, promote understanding of others, inspire imaginative exploration, and serve as a tools for problem-solving. Our activities will include close listening to sounds and then designing new instruments, individually and collaboratively, to recreate these sounds and others that have not yet been imagined. Raising awareness about how we contribute toward the future, we will devote ourselves to creating materials and techniques that the next generation of students can use and develop further. We will aim to generate designs for the future that are themselves open to reuse and reimagination. (MUSIC-MT)
This class examines the centrality of audiotape to the aesthetic and political cultures of the late Cold War period. After writing On the Road in the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac spent twenty years writing a novel that tried, in part, to emulate in literary writing the properties and capacities of tape recording. By the time Visions of Cody was finally published in 1972, audiotape had become an aesthetic medium in its own right, its capacity for editing inspiring revolutions in music, art, and writing. From its very inception, however, it was also an instrument of political communication and surveillance. With an eye to the state and another to the field of music, this class will focus on the way literary writing responded to and incorporated the new technology. (ENGL-PST)
Individual instruction in voice, organ, harpsichord, piano and fortepiano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and some brass and woodwind instruments to those students advanced enough to do college-level work in these instruments. For more information about individual instruction, see the section titled Musical Instruction. (MUSIC-PL)
Study and performance of classic and contemporary big band literature. (MUSIC-PL)
Study and performance of classic and contemporary small-group jazz. (MUSIC-PL)
The Cornell Chamber Orchestra provides its members the opportunity to develop their artistry and enhance their knowledge of chamber orchestra and string repertoire in a dynamic and engaging environment. Students perform a variety of repertoire that encompasses works from the baroque to the 21st century through a range of activities: chamber performances, composer and repertoire readings, educational and community outreach activities, tours, and collaborations with faculty and guest artists. (MUSIC-PL)
Small ensembles meet weekly to explore diverse flute repertoire including a variety of instrumentation (piccolo, alto flute, bass flute). There will be a performance opportunity at the end of the semester on a chamber concert or in a studio class setting. (MUSIC-PL)
(MUSIC-PL)
Concentrated instruction for students in advanced techniques of performance on Indonesian gamelan instruments. (MUSIC-PL)
Study and performance of chamber music works from duos to octets, for all instruments and voice. Students will be expected to attend a one hour coaching each week and rehearse on their own as well. There will be a final performance at the end of the semester and possible additional performance opportunities.Students may be invited to join in the department of music's weekly reading sessions with faculty by invitation. (MUSIC-PL)
(MUSIC-HC)
Independent study affords students the opportunity to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the independent course, must approve the proposed study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work. Students must prepare a proposal for independent study. To apply for independent study, please complete the online form. Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.
First semester of the two semester honors program. In conjunction with faculty, selected candidates formulate a program that allows them to demonstrate their musical and scholarly abilities, culminating in an honors thesis, composition, or recital (or some combination of these), to be presented in their senior year.
Second semester of the two semester honors program. In conjunction with faculty, selected candidates formulate a program that allows them to demonstrate their musical and scholarly abilities, culminating in an honors thesis, composition, or recital (or some combination of these), to be presented in their senior year.
This course explores two necessary components for advanced study and research in the discipline of music: 1) practicalities of research, including concepts, methodologies, and tools, which introduces students to social constructions of knowledge and how it is managed by libraries and archives, as well as many types of bibliographic tools, both printed and electronic; 2) critical approaches and theories of music, sound, performance, and cultural meaning, which introduces the students to key disciplinary and interdisciplinary intellectual movements and scholarly works.
This seminar explores musical, aesthetic, physiological, and mythical concepts of touch in relation to music. Focusing on the relationship between the body of the musician and musical sound, we will develop an interdisciplinary history of musical touch from the late 18th century to the present. How are sensibility and sympathy, performance and material culture, instruments and bodies, figured in terms of touch and touching? Exploring haptics, disability studies, new musical instruments, music cognition, physiology, theory of listening, topics include the clavichord as tactile revelation of genius; the glass harmonica, blindness, and physiology of the nervous system; technologies of touch in the 19th century; the fetishization of the disciplined hand; the absent or fantastic touch and its relation to music-making at early 20th-century electronic instruments, especially the Theremin; deafness, musical vibration and wearables; contemporary touch-sensitive keyboarding.Readings include C. P. E. Bach on keyboard practice, Diderot on sympathetic vibration, German romantic fiction, contemporary theory of sensibility, physiology, and new materialism; composers include Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, MacPherson and many unknowns. Visual materials include representations of the sensing body, hand casts and photographs, and 'hand-fetish' films such as the 1924 expressionist classic The Hands of Orlac.Our aim will be to develop a broader understanding of music culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to recognize connections between keyboard culture, histories of the body, and the fine arts. Students will refine critical reading and research skills, and practice the art of developing imaginative research questions.
Ever-increasing global interconnection drives some of the most pressing political and ethical questions of our time. This seminar centers on two intersecting areas of inquiry. The first deals with the nature of global movements: how people, ideas, arts, and capital move through world. Engaging postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary migration and transnationalism, we will interrogate the idea of borders and nations as well as those categories-like diaspora-that surpass or circumvent them. The second addresses how and why we might study these processes ethnographically. Here we will consider the potential and limitations of multi-sited and global ethnography, and question the possibility of an activist ethnography of global interconnection.
Based on the holdings of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, this course will be based on encounters with organs, clavichords, harpsichords, pianos, and synthesizers. In approaching them, we will treat the term keyboard as both a noun and a verb: like skateboard or snowboard, it can represent both an object and ways of interacting with it. Students will situate each instrument within geographical and historical ecologies that acknowledge the origins of its materials, the labor that brought it into being, the play that has animated it, the repertoire that has sustained it, and the people it has connected. Over the course of the semester, each student will define and pursue a substantial research project based on a single instrument.
Using Cornell University Library’s extensive archival collections on punk, hip hop, electronic music and EDM, this course will introduce students to the practice and theory of archival research on these music subcultures from the 1970s to early 2000s. Through a focus on primary sources, students will engage directly with the history of these genres and develop the critical skills for evaluating and working with different types of artifacts (including correspondence, photographs, flyers and posters, business records, recordings, contemporaneous newspapers and magazines). The course will also consider topics such as: ethical approaches to working with communities of living people; the sustainability and futurity of community controlled and institutional archives; and how archivists and archival repositories identify, appraise, acquire, describe, and provide public access to materials. Guest speakers may include musicians who have placed their personal archives at Cornell, and pop music journalists and biographers who have used the archives in their work, and other curators and community archivists. Some familiarity with popular music history from 1960-2000 is required.
This seminar serves as a rigorous introduction to the scholarly study of music and sound. We will read classic books and articles as well as more recent influential contributions, concentrating on scholarship in ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and sound studies. We will seek to understand how scholars have analyzed musical works of art, social practices of music making, and cultures of listening in different historical periods and in different parts of the world. Our goal will be to develop a general understanding of the current state of the field.
This seminar examines the role of ethnographic writing in musical anthropology, exploring how ethnographic knowledge is produced, authorized, and consumed. It critically interrogates ethnography's generic conventions, probing its relation to travel writing, memoir, poetry, and fiction, and engaging narrative, experimental, reflexive and auto- ethnography. Drawing on performance studies, it considers the textuality of musical events and weighs the particular challenges, possibilities, and limitations of writing ethnographically about sound, music, and movement. In doing so, it explores the temporality and spatiality of ethnographic writing, engages related critiques of the so-called ethnographic present, and considers issues of representation and subjectivity. Students will approach these questions through critical readings in anthropology and ethnomusicology as well as through weekly workshopping of their own writing.
This course offers a unique opportunity to engage in a dynamic, multi-sited exploration of music production, cultural exchange, and technological collaboration. This course is open to songwriters, performers, producers, and engineers who want to collaborate remotely with peers in Rwanda to produce and showcase original compositions, fostering a rich cross-cultural dialogue through music. By integrating theoretical knowledge with practical experience, students will increase their ability to create and collaborate in the recording studio, as well as cultivating different strategies for long-distance collaboration on musical projects.
This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.
What is a sounding object or musical instrument, and how does human culture shape these unique human-made material sources of sound? In a workshop environment, students will explore how instruments and sound objects can be modified or bent to produce yet more sounds. By using ideas from music, sound art, and sound studies and being inspired by visiting instrument makers, we will explore what instruments are and could be. Students, working alone or in collaboration, will design and build (which could include a conceptual reworking) their own instrument or sounding object that they will learn how to operate and modify to make new sounds.
Making Sound Futures is a transdisciplinary, transformative, hands-on studio course that nurtures curiosity and promotes experimentation, intuitive decision-making, and risk-taking. Embracing imperfection and uncertainty, we will construct sonic instruments to facilitate self-discovery, promote understanding of others, inspire imaginative exploration, and serve as a tools for problem-solving. Our activities will include close listening to sounds and then designing new instruments, individually and collaboratively, to recreate these sounds and others that have not yet been imagined. Raising awareness about how we contribute toward the future, we will devote ourselves to creating materials and techniques that the next generation of students can use and develop further. We will aim to generate designs for the future that are themselves open to reuse and reimagination.
A course on strategies and techniques for live musical performance with technology, including multimedia: image, video, movement, and sound. In developing our awareness of tools for live music with various media, we will explore several stylistic, technical, and logistical approaches, including collaboration and ensemble. We will engage with an array of software and hardware combinations within a variety of performance spaces, seeking to both understand and subvert standard practices for our own creative purposes.
Across countless geographically and temporally distinct cultures, people have developed accounts of musical materials and techniques: what they believe music is, what it is made of, and how. People have also marveled at-and sought to comprehend-music's mysterious power to affect us, and have offered speculative theories and practical pedagogies in response. This course offers an introduction to some influential ideas, practices, and traditions of theorizing music, broadly construed, in various world cultures at distinct moments.
A course for DMA graduate composers seeking individual music composition instruction, the course combines one-on-one meetings with group seminars featuring workshops, master classes, and/or visiting guests. In addition to individual and group meetings, composers will have opportunities for the reading and/or performance of their work.
One-on-one composition lessons for graduate students in the DMA in Composition. The course offers lessons with a faculty instructor, aimed at developing and discussing new works in progress.
Topic for Fall 2025: The Mediation of Nineteenth-Century Music This seminar will explore the mediation of nineteenth-century European music by investigating the philosophical, aesthetic, and technological conditions that engendered and sustained it. How were musical content and form conceptualized, materialized, transmitted, and stored, particularly in relation to shifting ways of imagining and materializing sound? The seminar will frame these questions via theoretical readings and address them in specific contexts via music-historical and analytical discourse.
This seminar will investigate themes in the interdisciplinary field of inquiry known as sound studies. We will read texts from diverse disciplines with a focus on historical rather than ethnographic approaches to sound; therefore, we will treat such topics as listening, material culture (instruments, architectures), audio technologies, and sonic embodiment from the perspective of music history and its attendant methods. Rather than attempting a chronological history of sound, this syllabus groups the assigned readings around topic areas, allowing seminar participants to recognize sympathetic methodological concerns among disparate scholars, and to register important differences about how to research and write the history of sound.
This seminar explores the recent “global turn” in music history: a call to confront the discipline’s imperial legacies, decenter nation-bounded narratives, and cultivate post-Eurocentric frameworks for a more equitable historiography. With a focus on voice and empire (when listening across colonial lines, who counts as a proper human?) we’ll read important literature in and outside music studies that have been central to the development of this field. Some questions we’ll grapple with are as follows: What are the arguments for and against the global turn? Is globality a relevant framework for any research project in music and sound? What does it mean to decolonize knowledge production in music studies?
The seminar is centered around one of the richest 18th-century texts concerning music: the three-volume diary published in the early 1770s by the English music historian and composer Charles Burney documenting his travels through France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. In addition to Burney’s diaries, we will read other travel writings of the period, as well as excerpts from the history of music researched by Burney during his European sojourns. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, the seminar will address themes such as music historiography, biography, cosmopolitanism, politics and music, and changing conceptions of travel and cultural exchange.
We will read groundbreaking scholarly and public-facing texts in the relatively new field of Ecomusicology, a sub-discipline that considers musical practices and ideologies in relation to their environments. The course challenges long-held claims for music as an autonomous enterprise distinct from nature and investigates the status of music as an evocation of landscape, weather, birdsong, and as a mode of nostalgia, alienation and resistance. Systems of production (music printing and dissemination, instrument fabrication, modes of recorded sound and delivery) will be considered along with other technological and moral aspects of music making and consumption. What are the possible purposes of sonic creativity in an age of environmental apocalypse? Locally oriented research projects and artistic collaborations will be fostered.
Semiotics of Listening is a graduate seminar exploring listening as an active, interpretive process through which meaning is produced, mediated, and contested. Drawing on semiotics, sound studies, philosophy, and media theory, the course examines how signs are sounded, heard, interpreted, and negotiated across social, political, and aesthetic contexts. Students will engage critical texts, close listening practices, and experimental methods to rethink listening as a site of knowledge, power, and relation.
This course will explore modes of listening across a wide variety of musical genres and traditions, past and present, considering the ways people hear music differently in a broad range of contexts. Students will reflect critically on their own listening paradigms, on the assumptions and preconceptions that affect how we translate what we hear into feeling and knowing, and on the stakes of those translations. The intention of the course is to develop our critical awareness of the power and politics involved in both everyday listening practices and listening as a scientific ethnographic method. Centering a black queer ethic of care, the course will bring together key texts from Black feminist musicologists, cultural theorists, and ethnographers in order to help cultivate an ethic for listening as carework. Attending the power dynamics of listening both in the archive and in the field, participation in this course will be grounded in students' individual objects and sites of study.
Practices associated with sound art can be found throughout the global twentieth century, but it emerged as a concept around 1980. What does it mean to say that a concept emerged? We will discuss this historiographical question at length in the seminar, tracing the genealogy of the sound-art concept and comparing its uneven historical development with various attempts at definition since 1980. Although many have advanced a logical definition based on identity conditions, we will instead adopt a historical approach. Our template will be Lydia Goehr’s influential argument about the concept of the musical work; other important authors will include Foucault, Davidson, and Hacking.
This seminar will survey and assess new developments in music studies that open up fundamental theoretical questions about its basic object of analysis: music. These problems for thought include the transition from works to practices, the reformulation of audiences, the end of European claims of aesthetic universality, the reappraisal of human-centered accounts of music, the historical emergence of the categories of sound and sound art, and the destabilization of what counts as knowledge about music and how musical expertise has been institutionalized. As the social and historical conditions that once gave rise to the scholarly study of music are displaced by a new global formation, music studies appear uncertain about what it's object might be, hence the title of this seminar.
This course explores the intersections of critical disability studies and ethnography, the latter understood both as method and as mode(s) of writing. We will consider ethnography’s potential to intervene in medicalized or pathologizing frameworks of disability. We will interrogate ethnography’s tacit ableism and question the possibilities and challenges of a disabled ethnographic method. Centering questions of embodiment, we will draw on queer studies, Black studies, and feminist theory to collectively imagine disability as an emancipatory project that refigures the professional outputs and daily experience of academia.
Entering the lexicon of European philosophy in the 1700s, aesthetics attempted to name and analyze a particular kind of experience, judgment, object, or value. Its questions have been extended, critiqued, reformulated, and dismissed in the centuries since. In this seminar, we will read important texts in modern aesthetic theory (Hume, Kant), as well as some notable critiques that followed, from philosophy itself (Shusterman, Roelofs, Ngai) and from sociology (Bourdieu, Wolff). We will also consider two unavoidable questions for modern/colonial aesthetics: what to do with the so-called primitive art of non-European cultures (Boas) and how to understand the challenge of Black aesthetics in the twentieth century (Locke, Baraka, Wynter).
The experience of complete absorption is becoming increasingly rare today, due to countless demands on our attention in the form of omnipresent technological blandishments. As a result, attention is being theorized, and arguably fetishized, as perhaps never before. This seminar will explore various concepts of auditory attention, taking historical, cross-cultural, and cognitive approach to the topic. It will survey recent work from music studies, but also the history of science, literary studies, and anthropology, that explores question of attention and its perceived opposite, distraction.
This seminar primarily explores the interplay of video and music through both the study and creation of Intermedia works. We will explore musical and visual strategies for shaping time-based art, with a focus on the relationship between sound and image. Intersections of sound with theater, sculpture, and interaction with AI will also be explored. Repertoire for the course includes analysis of intermedia works by composers such as Pamela Z, Jennifer Walshe, Brigitta Muntendorf, and Simon Steen-Andersen, alongside visual artists engaging with sound, including Joan Jonas, Arthur Jafa, Ryoji Ikeda, and Mark Leckey. Students will receive foundational instruction in audio and video editing software, leading to short creative études and a final intermedia composition. No prior experience in electronic music or video art is required. The course is open to graduate students in music and visual arts.
This seminar focuses on redefining the musical instrument. Participants will use musical instruments, everyday objects, materials, and architectural elements in conjunction with loudspeakers, kinetic and mechanical devices, and other systems to create sounding objects. In a workshop environment, the course traces the artistic work of building, composing for, and operating an instrument. Through this process, we will question notions of sound perception and generate new forms of sonic knowledge. In support of this aim, instruments will be taken apart and examined as autonomous resonant bodies. We will observe the form of these components, their materiality, their mechanics, and we will document their behavior in the context of new sonic functions. The instrumental/mechanical components will be combined with and modified by devices, materials, and other instruments. A final project using the work developed through the course can be submitted as a composition, a sound object, an instrumental device, an installation, or any combination thereof. The course is intended for graduate students in music but open to others by permission of the instructor.
This graduate seminar approaches sound art through composing with physical materials and space. Historical and contemporary works serve as points of departure for examining the relationship between composition and sound art. The emphasis throughout is embodied and material: work is made with hands, materials, and space rather than on a screen. The course concludes with a showcase of individual or collaborative student projects in sound art. The course is open to graduate students in Music, Art, Architecture, Performing and Media Arts, and related fields.
This course is designed to enable graduate students in musicology, performance and composition to become better acquainted with scholarly perspectives on the history, theory, and practice of musical performance. It is a foundational course within the Keyboard Studies DMA program. Moving from a genealogy of the term performance practice to the current state of critical performance studies, we will consider how notions of performance practice have changed over time, from formative debates over history, authenticity, and ontology to the absorption of recent developments in performance studies, embodied cognition, actor-network theory, cultural ecology, materials and computational sciences, and media archaeology. How have traditions and practices been transmitted orally, literally, technologically, conceptually, and corporeally? Whose authority is at stake? On what political, ethical, and aesthetic grounds have claims to historical fidelity been laid and challenged? What has been gained and lost in the process?By the end of this course, students will have developed a deep and broad understanding of performance practice in relation to these questions and the broader field of music studies. They will also have articulated its scope and limits in relation to specific historical periods, geographical locales, and repertoires as well as to their contemporary construal and interconnection.
Independent study affords students the opportunity to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the independent course, must approve the proposed study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.
Source: Cornell University's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
