The Art of Listening
MUSIC-UA 3, Section 001
Instructor: TBA
Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM
Course Description: Students acquire a basic vocabulary of musical terms, concepts, and listening skills in order to describe their responses to musical experiences. Considers the structure and style of influential works in the Western art music repertoire, popular music, or other musical cultures, with attention to the wider social, political, and artistic context.
Course does not count toward the Music major. Course can be counted toward the Music minor as an elective.
Aural Perception
MUSIC-UA 193, Section 001
Instructor: Alice Teyssier
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM (SEM)
Fridays 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM (RCT) or Fridays 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM (RCT)
Course Description: This course considers a number of deep, long-standing, and telling contradictions in the study of music. It is a human universal, yet it must be learned, and musical “systems” are not easily calibrated to each other. Music presents itself as a symbolic form of communication, but what and how it symbolizes and communicates is often mysterious. It lives as sound in social interaction, yet its analysis often takes place in the silence of written forms (scores and articles). Through reading, listening, viewing, discussing, and performing, our goal in this class will be to arrive at a more fully embodied, immersive, and sounded (and thereby sound) understanding of how music works in our lives.
This is the foundational course for CAS music majors, but it is open to any students who wish to enroll.
Students must also register for one of the two listed RCT sections.
Elements of Music
MUSIC-UA 20, Section 001
Instructor: Campbell Shiflett
Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM (LEC)
Mondays 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM (LAB) or Wednesdays 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM (LAB)
Course Description: Explores the underlying principles and inner workings of the tonal system, a system that has guided all of Western music from the years 1600 to 1900. It includes a discussion of historical background and evolution. Focuses on concepts and notation of key, scale, tonality, and rhythm. Related skills in sight-singing, dictation, and keyboard harmony are stressed in the recitation sections.
Course does not count toward the Music major. Course can be counted toward the Music minor as a theory course.
Students must also register for one of the two listed LAB sections.
Music Theory I
MUSIC-UA 201, Section 001
Instructor: Moon Ha
Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30 AM- 10:45 AM (SEM)
Mondays 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM (LAB) or Wednesdays 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM (LAB)
Course Description: Students study principles of tonal music composition including 18th and 19th century harmonic, formal, and contrapuntal practices. Exercises in four-part voice-leading and species counterpoint are supplemented by analyses of music from around the world and from a variety of genres, including concert and popular music. Weekly lab sections are devoted to skills in musicianship and are required throughout the sequence.
Music Major Requirement. Students must also register for one of the two listed LAB sections.
Music Theory II
MUSIC-UA 202, Section 001
Instructor: Gordon Beeferman
Tuesdays & Thursdays 9:30 AM - 10:45 PM (SEM)
Mondays 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM (LAB) or Wednesdays 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM (LAB)
Course Description: Chromatic harmony as developed and practiced by composers of the 19th century and beyond. Introduction to score reading and principles of musical analysis applied to larger musical structures. Continuation of species counterpoint and an introduction to invertible counterpoint and fugue.
Music Major Requirement. Students must also register for one of the two listed LAB sections.
Performance & Analysis
MUSIC-UA 206, Section 001
Instructor: Louis Karchin & Alice Teyssier
Wednesdays 3:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Course Description: Students will study and learn to perform works from various periods of music, with a focus on interpretation and analysis. The works may be studied as individual or group projects (solo pieces or chamber music), and regular coachings will be supplemented with sessions delving into analysis of the music. A brief audition is required to establish proficiency on an instrument, and students should contact the instructors Prof. Alice Teyssier (teyssier@nyu.edu) and Prof. Louis Karchin (lsk1@nyu.edu) to schedule a time. May be repeated for credit.
Area of Study: Sonic Art
Principles of Composition
MUSIC-UA 307, Section 001
Instructor: TBA
Thursdays 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Course Description: Explores various compositional techniques, with an emphasis on modern-day writing procedures. Students write music regularly and receive suggestions from the instructor intended to foster the development of their individual compositional voices. Students also study specific musical scores corresponding to their areas of interest.
PREREQUISITE: MUSIC THEORY I
Area of Study: Sonic Art
Special Topics Seminar: Audio Art
MUSIC-UA 901, Section 001
Instructor: Jaime Oliver
Mondays & Wednesdays 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM (SEM)
Tuesdays 3:30 PM - 4:45 PM (RCT) or Thursday 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM (RCT)
Course Description: This course is about three interconnected elements: (1) an art practice using digital audio (which we might call music or sound art), that (2) exists in a specific context (the world around each of us), and that (3) happens today, right now. To do this we will review theoretical and historical material from the last 70 years or so, to learn about the theories and ideas that have become foundational to audio art made today; listening, reading and reacting to get a sense of the huge variety of music and sound art today. The aim of the course is that you make various audio artwork projects and a final project, meeting in groups and individually to talk about our projects and dealing with the technical requirements of working in the recording studio and around the city.
The main aim and final project of this course is to MAKE a new work of music or sound art using audio that takes into consideration its context. The first part of the course will focus more heavily on understanding how sonic and musical practices have responded to cultural and epistemic changes and thus explore the ways in which these practices respond to their times and context. We will embark in an exploration of how music and sound art may differ and coexist as we pay special attention to musical practices that were traditionally considered less important or too experimental or even elitist, like street performances, musique concrete, soundscape composition, site-specific installations and performances, telematic performances, acousmatic music, soundwalks, audiowalks, and many others. As we move forward we will draw from both historical examples seen through today’s lens and from current examples of people adapting to make music in the covid era. The second part of the course will focus more heavily on developing your final project over individual meetings and group critiques. A big part of this course will involve you working independently and taking your work very seriously.
Students must also register for one of the two listed RCT sections.
Area of Study: Sonic Art
Special Topics Seminar: Tuning In: The Politics of Musical Practice
MUSIC-UA 901, Section 004
Instructor: Fanny Gribenski
Tuesdays 11:00 AM - 1:30 PM
Course Description: Being in tune, setting the tone, speaking in unison: musical sounds have served as the basis for some of the most common metaphors of social and political harmony. But they have also been at the center of actual negotiations between practitioners from different musical worlds for the last two hundred years. Throughout this class, we will examine the controversies that have, and continue to surround tuning and musical pitch, from Western classical musicians’ efforts to create a unified standard for musical practice to the production of alternative tuning standards in various subcultures, and from transcultural endeavors around the definition of scales to the design of software aimed at decolonizing electronic music. In so doing, we will go beyond specific genres and repertoires to explore the potential of sound itself to deepen our understanding of the relation between music and politics.
Area of Study: Music, History, and Culture; Sonic Art
Special Topics Seminar: Consent Lab
MUSIC-UA 901, Section 005
Instructor: Brigid Cohen
Tuesdays 12:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Course Description: Consent is how we know we are doing a thing together. Consent means setting some parameters for that thing. Consent is about risk, trust, and play. Any social compact begins with consent. The more parties involved, the more elusive consent becomes. Taking such insights to heart, this class will bring an experiential and multi-disciplinary approach to the study of consent with scholars and art practitioners working in literature, drama, interactive media arts, and musicology. Students will Investigate issues of consent through interdisciplinary art practices, improvisation exercises, and the analysis of day-to-day encounters. They will also encounter consent as a vexed theme and concept in philosophy, literature, and the performing arts from the 17th century to the present.
Moving beyond legalistic understandings of consent, this course equips students with practice-based tools to investigate emotionally difficult topics. Conceived with an experimental design, this course participates in a 2022-23 NYU Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab.
Area of Study: Music, History, and Culture; Sonic Art
Internship
MUSIC-UA 981, Section 001
Permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies Required
Independent Study
MUSIC-UA 997, Section 001
2 or 4 credits
Permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies Required
Independent Study
MUSIC-UA 998, Section 001 and Section 002
2 or 4 credits
Permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies Required