Spring 2024: Music, Cinema, and Video Games
Instructor: Gui Hwan Lee

This seminar will develop an understanding of film and video game music as historical, cultural, artistic practices. Through diverse scholarship as well as case studies, students will learn the terminology, skills, and knowledge to analyze the music in films and video games. In addition, students will also have opportunities to discuss the sociopolitical issues reflected in film and video game soundtracks.

Spring 2023: Anti-Colonial Approaches to the Analysis of Musical Form
Instructor: Judith Ofcarcik

In this class we will be studying how music theory has embodied colonial values in the past, particularly in the adoption of cartography-influenced visual representations of musical form, and how we might envision a new way of viewing musical works outside of the colonial lens. Repertoire will include music by indigenous, First Nations, and Metis Canadians.

Spring 2022: Music and Meaning
Instructor: John Peterson

In this course, we will immerse ourselves in modes of analysis and criticism that largely fall under the umbrella term “music and meaning.” Each of these analytical modes represents a way to hear and interpret music from a different perspective. Put simply, in this course we'll think about how to process what we're hearing and how to better communicate what we are hearing to others. The course is intended for students who are interested in thinking seriously about how we hear and interpret music, and who are willing to engage in challenging reading, writing, and discussion assignments.

Spring 2021: Analysis of Twentieth-Century Opera
Instructor: Stan Fink

Using appropriate methodologies, this course seeks to analyze correlations between musical structure and the literary and dramatic domains of twentieth-century operas. The course will consider some historically significant and widely analyzed works as well as some lesser-known works. By studying scores and performances, reading published analyses and developing our own analyses, and drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, this course seeks to improve our understanding of twentieth-century opera.

Spring 2020: The Music of Underrepresented Composers
Instructor: John Peterson

Recently the musical community has made a focused effort to increase the diversity of the music we perform, discuss, critique, and disseminate. This course contributes to those efforts through analysis and discussion of music by underrepresented composers. The term itself is fraught with meaning, and through the course we will address sensitive issues such as what it means to be underrepresented, what it would look like for Western classical music to be labeled “diverse” by today’s societal standards, and what the implications of diversity are for the music we offer to the public. Since these issues are also being addressed in public forums (e.g. newspapers, online media outlets), the course will necessarily engage with public music discourse.

Spring 2019: Advanced Seminar in Post-Tonal Analysis
Instructor: Eric Guinivan

This course is centered on the study and application of analytical techniques appropriate to post-tonal music of the twentieth century. The course will include critical discussion of analytical methodologies, examination of selected analytical literature, and analysis of representative repertoire by composers such as Schoenberg, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, and others. Knowledge of basic music history and literature of this period is presumed. Students will develop skill in the study and application of post-tonal analysis through weekly analysis and reading assignments, class discussions, and a major end-of-semester analysis project.

Spring 2018: Felix Mendelssohn
Instructor: John Peterson

The middle of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in Felix Mendelssohn’s music within the musicological community after a decline following his death in 1847. The decline might be attributable to two factors: (1) a desire within the German artistic community—as represented, for instance, by Wagnerian principles—to look toward the future rather than the past, a trait many would see as oppositional to Mendelssohn’s aesthetic; (2) the rise of Nazism, which led to the repression, denigration, and sometimes destruction of objects and works associated with Mendelssohn. Although the music-historical community has been at work re-discovering Mendelssohn’s life and music since the mid-twentieth-century, the music-theoretical community has only recently begun to turn its attention toward his music. In this course students will survey Mendelssohn’s output, beginning with his early works, and concentrating on works composed between 1830-40, a period that led to the pinnacle of Mendelssohn’s success.