Current Music Courses

Rose Hill, Spring 2025 Courses

MUSC 2120 - Introduction to Music Theory
Intro to Music Theory is a course designed for the student who wants to learn the basics of reading music notation (music written on the staff using treble and bass clefs), as well as the fundamentals of music theory such as scales, keys and key signatures, and intervals. This course assumes little to no formal musical training, and students need not be able to read music before taking this class. Students who do read music already, but lack some knowledge in theory fundamentals, are also encouraged to take this course.

MUSC 2231 – Introduction to Jazz Improvisation
Introduction to the practice of jazz improvisation including scales, chords, transcription, stylistic analysis and performance. Students will play through exercises in class and transcribe solos for their own instruments. Open to all students regardless of background and experience.

MUSC 3124 – Music of the Modernist Age
This course studies the engagement of Western music with the modernist and postmodernist movements that shaped much of 20th-century cultural sensibility. Starting with the innovations of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Ives, it traces historically how musicians in Europe and America rose to the challenges posed by the intellectual, artistic, political, social, and scientific upheavals of the age as they explored not only new ways of making music and organizing sound itself, but also new ways of thinking about music and creating musical meaning. It also examines cultural conversations that took place between traditions of art music and vernacular music such as jazz, whose musicians explored ways of engaging with modernism on their own terms.

Rose Hill, Fall 2024

MUSC 2140 - Fundamentals of Keyboard Musicianship
This is an intensive hands-on course in the basic skills necessary for the expression of musicianship at the keyboard. First, we learn to read, write, and interpret the fundamental elements of music theory: pitch, clef, and interval; rhythm and meter; scales and key signatures. Then, we apply these tools to the analysis and realization of triads and seventh chords, using both Roman numerals and jazz lead-sheet notation. No prior background assumed.

MUSC 2141 - Keyboard Lab
Offered in conjunction with MUSC 2140. This practical lab focuses on applying music-theoretical skills at the keyboard: playing diatonic scales and chord progressions; mastering specific compositions from the classical repertoire; developing a reliable sense of rhythm and meter; acquiring basic improvisational strategies and the technique of realizing jazz and popular styles from lead sheets.

MUSC 2145 - Music Theory I
Music Theory I is the first in a series of three required semester-long courses designed to offer a comprehensive overview of the theory of tonal music, especially of classical music during the Common Practice era, but also relating to the other genres, such as jazz and popular music. This course will cover the following subject areas: fundamentals of music theory, 2 and 3-voice counterpoint, triadic harmony, and the basics of four-part writing. This course is required for all music majors and minors. Students who do not have any prior music theory experience may be required to take an introductory level course, MUSC 2120, as a pre-requisite. Instructor permission should be granted before enrolling.

MUSC 2300 - Electronic Music and Music Production
An introduction to the creation, editing, and sequencing of electronic and recorded music using MIDI, computer software, sampling, and audio recordings.

Lincoln Center, Spring 2025 Courses

MUSC 2037 - Disability and Music
The discipline of music scholarship has a history of integrating critical and cultural studies, such as race and gender. During the past 15 years, music scholars have produced hundreds of publications convincingly demonstrating that music narrates, reflects, and constructs disability. This seminar pursues various applications of the intersection between music and disability with topics covering disability’s profound role in shaping musical identities (especially those of composers and performers) and representations of disability within musical discourses and narratives.

MUSC 2048 – World Music and Dance
This course will take an approach based on the premise that to study music is to study people, community, history, religion, politics and dance, as well as to study musical styles, forms and instruments. This approach provides the student with an appreciation of the sound, power and meaning of music as it exists within culture.

MUSC 2121 - Ear Training
Ear Training is an aural skills class designed to enhance the student musician’s ability to hear music in context as well as increase fluency in sight-reading and performance. Students will learn to both recognize by ear, and sing on command, the diatonic intervals, as well as training in rhythm and solfège. While there is no course pre-requisite, students must be fluent in reading music and have some knowledge of music theory fundamentals, such as the topics covered in Introduction to Music Theory (MUSC 2120).

MUSC 2146 – Music Theory II
Music Theory II is a continuation of the required three-course music theory sequence. The class will deal primarily with the principles of diatonic harmony as found in classical music of the Common Practice era, as well as through more contemporary and popular styles. Students will learn about chord construction and progressions, and continue in the study of voice-leading principles (as exemplified by four-part writing) begun in Music Theory I. This course is required for all Music majors.

Lincoln Center, Fall 2024

MUSC 2147 - Music Theory III
This course is the last in the required three-course music theory sequence. It extends the principles of harmony and voice leading learned in MUSC 2146 (Music Theory II) and covers chromatic harmony, especially as practiced in the 19th century and in popular styles, as well as advanced musical forms.

MUSC 3123 - Music & the Age of Romanticism
Most of our current behaviors and beliefs with respect to Western music were first shaped in the cultural discourses of the nineteenth century. This course examines these as part of the interactions of nineteenth-century music composition, performance, reception, and criticism with the major social, intellectual, and cultural movements of the age, focusing on the work of Beethoven, Rossini, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, Mussorgsky, and Brahms.

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