Music

Introduction to music, including notation, written and aural skills, and basic conceptual resources of music theory. Exploration of scale, mode, rhythm, meter, texture and form, with reference to a diverse range of musics.

This course is designed for students who have little or no experience with playing, performing, reading, studying, composing, or improvising music. Students will be introduced to both skills and concepts that will enable them to participate in music making and deepen their appreciation of all types of music. 

Entrance by audition only. Call Barnard College, Department of Music during registration for time and place of audition (854-5096).

Entrance by audition only. Call Barnard College, Department of Music during registration for time and place of audition (854-5096).

Prerequisites: auditions by appointment made at first meeting. Contact Barnard College, Department of Music (854-5096). Membership in the chorus is open to all men and women in the University community. The chorus gives several public concerts each season, both on and off campus, often with other performing organizations. Sight-singing sessions offered. The repertory includes works from all periods of music literature. Students who register for chorus will receive a maximum of 4 points for four or more semesters.

Prerequisites: contact Barnard College, Department of Music (854-5096). Membership in the chorus is open to all men and women in the University community. The chorus gives several public concerts each season, both on and off campus, often with other performing organizations. Sight-singing sessions offered. The repertory includes works from all periods of music literature.

How did Elvis become the “King of Rock’n’Roll” instead of, for example, Chuck Berry? Who are LaVern Baker, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Etta James and what do they have to do with rock and roll? Why and how did “rock and roll” become “rock”? What are the relationships among rock, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk? What do classical music composers such as J.S. Bach, Modest Mussorgsky, and Philip Glass have to do with rock? How many times has rock “died”? What is rock music’s relevance both historically and today? This course will introduce you to popular music studies, a field of inquiry that draws scholars from a number of different disciplines, including musicology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology and literature. Examining rock music in an interdisciplinary way has opened the genre to increasing attention beyond musicological methodologies and assumptions. First, however, we must ask some fundamental questions: for instance, what, exactly, is popular music as well as, importantly, what differentiates rock music from other genres? Our definitions will reveal some of the assumptions we bring to any discussion of popular music. Throughout this semester, we will question our assumptions about rock music culture through an investigation into a series of keywords. Each keyword will focus our attention on various aspects of rock music in order to think through the complexities of what might, on the surface, seem self-evident. Terms such as “genre” or “the everyday” will be examined to help us gain critical analytical tools with which to assess various rock music productions, artists, and processes. 

The musical and cultural features of jazz, beginning in 1900.

In order to exist, the female vocal celebrity needs a public. This course takes a global perspective on women’s voices, bodies, and performances, examining them in deep sociocultural contexts across a range of classical and popular music genres. Guiding questions interrogate the role of media and technology in commercializing and circulating the sounds and images of women singers on an international scale, forging new arenas for meaning-making around gender, race, and citizenship. Considering the historically, socially, and materially situated circumstances in which celebrated women performers have emerged in the modern era, the course asks: How did the expressive labor of virtuosic female singers shape the early US entertainment industry? In what ways have women singers around the world impacted nation-centered political agendas, struggles for racial equality, and other powerful religious and secular social formations? How did sound reproduction and broadcasting technology not only expand audiences on an exponential scale, but transform listeners’ experience of female singers’ live performance? Cross-culturally and throughout history, why have exceptional women vocalists had greater public impact than women instrumentalists? 

An introduction to the potential of digital sound synthesis and signal processing. Teaches proficiency in elementary and advanced digital audio techniques. This course aims to challenge some of the tacet assumptions about music that are built into the design of various user interfaces and hardware and fosters a creative approach to using digital audio workstation software and equipment.  Permission of Instructor required to enroll. Music Majors have priority for enrollment.

An introduction to the potential of digital sound synthesis and signal processing. Teaches proficiency in elementary and advanced digital audio techniques. This course aims to challenge some of the tacet assumptions about music that are built into the design of various user interfaces and hardware and fosters a creative approach to using digital audio workstation software and equipment.  Permission of Instructor required to enroll. Music Majors have priority for enrollment.

An introduction to the potential of digital sound synthesis and signal processing. Teaches proficiency in elementary and advanced digital audio techniques. This course aims to challenge some of the tacet assumptions about music that are built into the design of various user interfaces and hardware and fosters a creative approach to using digital audio workstation software and equipment.  Permission of Instructor required to enroll. Music Majors have priority for enrollment.

Elementary analysis and composition in a variety of modal and tonal idioms. 

Elementary analysis and composition in a variety of tonal idioms.  

In this course, students at all levels of experience and musical interest will participate in solo and group activities and projects with a focus on musical beat, meter, and rhythm patterns, developing a sense of steady and changing tempo, and an understanding how rhythm contributes to style in music. Rhythmic articulation, nuance, and interpretation will be developed through the impact of agogic, metric, tonal, and dynamic accent. This course combines the standards of conservatory musicianship with standards of critical thinking, here represented as critical listening. The repertoire for Musicianship: Rhythm covers vocal and instrumental music, and is open to classical, pop, jazz, folk, music theatre, computer, and international music styles and genres.

In this course, students at all levels of experience and musical interest will participate in solo and group activities and projects with a focus on musical beat, meter, and rhythm patterns, developing a sense of steady and changing tempo, and an understanding how rhythm contributes to style in music. Rhythmic articulation, nuance, and interpretation will be developed through the impact of agogic, metric, tonal, and dynamic accent. This course combines the standards of conservatory musicianship with standards of critical thinking, here represented as critical listening. The repertoire for Musicianship: Rhythm covers vocal and instrumental music, and is open to classical, pop, jazz, folk, music theatre, computer, and international music styles and genres.

In this course, students at all levels of experience and musical interest will participate in solo and group activities and projects with a focus on scales, intervals, melodic contour and phrasing, and how they contribute to style in music. The repertoire for Musicianship: Melody covers vocal and instrumental music, and is open to classical, pop, jazz, folk, music theatre, computer, and international music styles and genres.

In this course, students at all levels of experience and musical interest will examine the phenomenon of simultaneous sound with chords and chord progressions, and experience harmony’s impact on musical structure and style. Harmonic articulation, nuance, and interpretation will be developed through the exploration of agogic, metric, tonal, and dynamic accent. The repertoire for Musicianship: Harmony covers vocal and instrumental music, and is open to classical, pop, jazz, folk, music theatre, computer, and international music styles and genres.

In this course, students at all levels of experience and musical interest will examine the phenomenon of simultaneous sound with chords and chord progressions, and experience harmony’s impact on musical structure and style. Harmonic articulation, nuance, and interpretation will be developed through the exploration of agogic, metric, tonal, and dynamic accent. The repertoire for Musicianship: Harmony covers vocal and instrumental music, and is open to classical, pop, jazz, folk, music theatre, computer, and international music styles and genres.

This seminar explores Black musical history as a vital site of memory, archive, and storytelling, centering music within Black experience, history, and culture. Framed as a seminar on musical thought, the course begins in the early 1900s and moves to the present day, tracing how Black music in the United States has functioned as a vessel for preserving history, shaping Black intellectual traditions, and narrating lived experience. Through practices of deep listening, students critically examine not only what we hear, but how we hear—interrogating racialized listening and the ways Black sound has been interpreted, appropriated, and institutionalized. Drawing on the ideals of early twentieth-century Black intellectuals, the course positions Black music as a space of resistance and an archive in its own right. Students engage Black archive practices and explore their connection to Black intellectual history, considering how African diasporic lineages shape Black music as ancestral expression. The seminar asks: What is Black music’s function in the United States? How has it helped form the broader national narrative? Through close study of genres such as funk, Hip Hop, opera, jazz, and R&B, in connection with and artists and composers such as Duke Ellington, Beyonce, D’Angelo, and Betty Davis,  students examine how Black musical forms carry cultural memory across generations. The course also interrogates how Black culture is displayed and curated in spaces not originally built for Blackness, challenging traditional frameworks of preservation and performance. Ultimately, the seminar invites students to understand  black music not simply as sound, but as a intentional intellectual, cultural, and historical practice. 

Topics in western music from the Classical Era to the 20th Century, focusing on the development of musical style and thought, and on analysis of selected works. Pre-req: Music Theory II or permission of instructor. 

This course provides an immersive experience in music composition, focusing on both practical and theoretical aspects within a given instrumentation. Please refer to the topic for the instrumentation for this semester’s course. This class is open to students with no prior experience in composition. Students of varying music backgrounds are welcome. Permission of the instructor may be required for enrollment. The class will explore a variety of compositional approaches, including traditional, experimental, and interdisciplinary methods. During the semester, students will complete several creative and theoretical exercises ranging from short composition projects to analytical responses to diverse works. Students will also engage in individual and group feedback sessions as well as in-class readings of selected compositional projects by the performers. The final project will be an original work between 5 and 7 minutes, which will be workshopped, rehearsed, performed in a public concert, and recorded by professional musicians towards the end of the term.

Intermediate analysis and composition in a variety of tonal idioms. 

Intermediate analysis and composition in a variety of tonal and extended tonal idioms. 

Overview of the theory of the modes from ancient Greece to the middle of the sixteenth century, tracing the themes that recur throughout writings about the tonal structures underlying music. While the emphasis will be on close reading of selected primary sources in English translation, we will also address the most influential arguments in the secondary literature. Reading music theory against musical compositions and scrutinizing scores in light of treatises will highlight the symbiosis of theory and practice that has shaped discourse on the modes.

The course presents tools, techniques, methodologies, and concepts for composing original music for dance (both acoustic and electronic). Composers will develop a work for dance collaborating with choreographers, culminating in a public showing at the end of the semester. Weekly meetings will be used to discuss the unique challenges (both practical and aesthetic) that this type of interdisciplinary collaboration raises, and to troubleshoot potential solutions. Students will examine case studies of collaborative composer/choreographer pairs (especially from the last 75 years), as potential models for working via the study of artist statements, interviews, articles, videos, and classroom discussions with invited guests. No prior experience writing for dance is necessary. Basic familiarity with a digital audio workspace is preferable. For participants who don’t write music or work in sound, a research project either analyzing a composer/choreographer pairing or looking at a topic relating to music and dance more broadly will serve as an equivalent final project (resulting in an academic paper, a podcast, or the production of an educational video).

This course explores the recording studio and Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) as tools for diverse compositional practices. By exploring a range of recording and editing techniques to craft new musical works beyond the limitations of live performance, this class encourages a seamless blend of composition and music production. Various genres, artists, and techniques that push the boundaries of music recording will be studied, such as Jamaican dub, musique concrète, hyper-pop, jazz fusion, and more. Students will gain hands-on experience with DAWs, exploring tools like effects processing, layering, and spatial placement. They will learn to listen closely to pieces exemplifying these techniques, building a shared analytic vocabulary to describe them. Students will also create original pieces, applying and building on the techniques studied in class, while engaging in constructive feedback with peers.

Modular Sound Synthesis is a hands-on studio class that explores contemporary techniques for synthesizers both in studio practice and performance while framing them in the historical context in which they developed. The class approaches the fundamentals of sound and synthesis through the perspective of Columbia’s Computer Music Center: vintage function generators, suitcase reel-to-reel tape machines, prototype modules, custom devices; and the first programmable music synthesizer, the RCA Mark II. Students will learn to perform and compose on both hardware devices and software emulations, utilizing them as a creative tool for recording and live performance. Topics include oscillators, modulation, sequencers, voltage processing, wave shaping, filters, and LFOs. The course will engage in listening to both historical and contemporary examples to develop critical listening skills. This class is designed as a follow-up to Intro to Digital Music for undergraduates or graduate students interested in integrating modular synthesis within their artistic practice.

Recording Studio Sessions places students in weekly recording sessions at Columbia’s Computer Music Center with guest bands and music ensembles. The course aims to give students as much hands-on recording studio experience as possible, with the end goal of developing studio skills that lead to the production of professional-level audio materials. Technical and preparatory information is covered during the one-hour class, immediately followed by a three-hour recording session. In addition to the recording sessions, students must watch asynchronous course materials, read weekly assignments, and mix materials from each week’s session. 

Investigation of contemporary composition topics through invited guest lectures, student and faculty presentations, listening sessions, and professional development workshops. DMA students only also receive one-on-one weekly composition lessons during which they will develop individual projects in composition (lessons are offered for the first three years of the DMA).

Interdisciplinary group work as part of Dissertation Proposal Seminar series.

Interdisciplinary group work as part of Dissertation Proposal Seminar series.