This course examines how politics and culture play out in that most refined of art forms: opera. The course will introduce students to the history of European opera, focusing on 19th century composers in France, Germany, and Italy. We will closely examine three operas: one French (Bizet's Carmen), one Italian (Verdi's Aida) and one German (Wagner's Die Meistersinger). Following Edward Said's work, we will examine how politics and culture play out in these works: European colonialism in Aida; the question of antisemitism in Wagner; stereotypes of Spain in Carmen. Includes excursions to the Metropolitan Opera.

This course brings together scholarship from musicologists, cognitive scientists, and biologists to explore the concept of "animal music" from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Animal music is an important topic because it harbors profound information about the history of life--by examining it in relation to human music making, we stand to gain a better understanding of everything from social synchronization and linguistic turn-taking to (bio)semiotics and cultural evolution. Using a combination of short lectures, student presentations, and creative projects, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the field.

In this course, we will examine various approaches to chromatic improvisation and composition as well as advanced rhythm techniques. Topics will include concepts such as superimposition, fixed intervals, pitch cells, modes, synthetic scales, 12-tone systems, chromatic harmonization, reharmonization, serialism, polyrhythm, additive rhythm, and more. We will also have several visiting guest artists who are high-level practitioners in the field. Past guests included Anna Webber, Gary Thomas, Miles Okazaki, and Dan Weiss.

This upper-level course will delve into the creation of new musical works for the stage, with an emphasis on music as an essential dramatic language. Students will explore the fundamentals of musical theater songwriting, as well as authentic musical theater writing processes including collaboration, adaptation, developing original story concepts, capturing musical ideas, engaging in dramaturgical discussions, sharing and receiving constructive criticism, rewriting, and presenting in-progress work. Following an introductory unit, students will utilize skills they are developing in class to create, workshop, and share a 3-person mini-musical.

Music 102 introduces foundational elements of music and offers new ways of engaging with them through exercises in listening and making. A broad and inclusive range of musical genres from around the world will be examined in equal measure to help develop insight into how and why music functions as a universal language. The course is designed to strengthen your ability to analyze and understand a wide variety of existing music from the past and present, and gain new approaches to composing your own. The emphasis is firmly on a practical application of the human centered concepts we encounter within music.

The intent of this course is to understand the fundamentals of tonal music by creatively using the theoretical concepts explored in class. The student will write melodies, harmonize and arrange both their own music and already existing songs and instrumental music. Voice-leading will be examined in context as students gain a more detailed understanding of the basics. We will place a lot of emphasis on listening to music and attempting to understand what we're listening to, so as to better enable model composition and theoretical understanding of tonal music.

A survey of vocal literature (excluding opera) from the fifteenth century to the present day. Lectures focus on representative works that illustrate historical developments in musical style, vocal texture, and text-music relationships; attention is also given to choral music's role as an institution of social engagement, an expression of collective identity, and the societal ability to rejoice, celebrate, critique, and mourn on an impersonal level.

Mus 238: Romantic Music is a survey of the major composers, styles, and genres of European art music in the nineteenth century. Focus falls on music and revolution, salon culture, the origins and development of the art song, opera and ballet and the supernatural, the maximalist extension of musical syntax and the late nineteenth-century pivot from Romanticism into Decadence.

In this course we will consider the art of music for the moving image. We will look at historic examples, scoring styles and techniques, and the choices that directors and composers make. We will begin by looking at the basic elements of film and music. Then we will consider the role of genre and style, focusing especially on early Hollywood and Russian filmmakers. Finally we will look at a range of modern scoring techniques including minimalism, jazz, popular music and electronic and experimental music. Students will undertake three written projects or creative responses.

A music composition class that explores the history of experimental rock music from the mid 60's to now.

This course examines the performance and reception of operas in the Americas between 1750 and 1950. Following the migration of singers, musicians, dancers, and other practitioners after the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, as well as the California Gold Rush, the performance of opera outside the European metropole is a fascinating way to engage in the history of migration, assimilation politics, and historical performance practice in displacement. In this course, we will trace the genre's development and its effect on national identity in America, the Caribbean, Canada, and South America.

The Junior Seminar is designed to introduce music majors to the study of music, conceived broadly. What kinds of questions might we ask about music, and what methods and materials can we use to explore these questions? What skills might you develop over the course of the semester that will both allow you to explore your interests and contribute to your professional life in the future? In addition to focusing on composition and musicology, we will also explore other aspects of the music business, such as arts administration, production, editing, performance, music education, and music criticism.

Though we associate musical processes with minimalism, composers have been setting them in motion, breaking them, riffing off them as long as they've been producing notes and sounds. Think of a canon or a sequence. We will of course spend a good deal of time on minimalism and postminimalism. We also consider the use of audio phenomena such as feedback to create new types of musical evolutions through time. While we will be doing a lot of analyzing and listening, the aim ultimately will be to help you write experimental musical compositions where you play with various balances of process and intuition.

This course is aimed at nurturing the compositional interests and aspirations of the individual participants. The class will include students of different backgrounds and interests. While each student will be working on projects of their own design there will occasionally be a listening and/or reading assignment of mutual interest. Between instrumentalists and vocalists in the class, friends on campus and paid ringers we will conjure live workshop rehearsals/performances of the work created as well as mock up renderings of work with notation and editing software.

An introduction to the fundamentals of computer and electronic music. The music and sound programming language ChucK, developed here at Princeton, will be used in conjunction with Max/MSP, another digital audio language, to study procedural programming, digital signal processing and synthesis, networking, and human-computer interfacing. Students present their work to the public in the "House of Sound" event in the Forum of the Lewis Arts Complex.

Moving from Baghdad to Paris, Jerusalem to Addis Ababa, Iceland to Dunhuang, this course examines the musical cultures of some of the most vibrant centers of the Middle Ages. We consider what it means to study medieval music "globally," focusing on the physical traces of premodern music and key moments of cultural contact (trade, pilgrimage, conflict). Students will encounter the distant musical past in a variety of materials and formats (paper manuscripts, papyrus fragments, parchment rolls) in regular visits to Princeton's Special Collections.

MUS 498 is the first half of a year-long course that supports Music Department students in the research and preparation of their senior thesis. During the fall semester, students are required to formulate their topic, meet regularly with their advisor (at least three times), submit an abstract and preliminary research plan (at midterm), a formal proposal with bibliography and supporting materials (as relevant).

Over the course of his lengthy career, Giuseppe Verdi composed three operas based on plays by William Shakespeare. His operatic treatment of Macbeth (1847) was composed when Verdi was only 33-years old; he would wait another forty years before returning to Shakespeare for his two final (and arguably greatest) operas: Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1891). This seminar focuses on a close reading and analysis of the relevant plays, their operatic antecedents, ottocento operatic conventions, performance traditions, singers, and representations of race, gender, class, and age.

In the past two decades, "sound studies" emerged as a major field of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. Understood as an important theoretical alternative to visual studies of media and society, sound studies has unearthed repressed histories of sound and listening and has situated the ear as a major instrument in the production of social, cultural, and scientific knowledge. This seminar focuses on key issues in sound studies, especially as those issues relate to musicology. We read canonical texts as well as considering new directions for the field. The seminar focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This course explores efforts within music theory and music cognition to link musical structure (ostensibly, properties of sound) with thoughts and feelings sustained by listeners. We consider theories of musical expectation from Meyer forward, and phenomenological accounts starting with Lewin. We look at how people have deplored continuous measures to try to track the dynamic relationship between musical structure and listener response. We grapple with contemporary efforts to link musical structure to the autobiographical memories and fictional imaginings people experience while listening.

Emphasis is placed upon the individual student's original work and upon the study and discussion of pieces pertinent to that work.

Righting Wrong Notes begins with the notion of 'blue' note-pitches that stand out as particularly expressive - and extends to 'wrongitude' in other realms more generally. Instead of normalizing perceived outliers as grammatically normative 'flat seventh,' 'part of a referential w,x,y,z tetrachord', 'inevitable' their disruptive nature is celebrated as intentional and a focus of inquiry.

Infinite Pitch is a seminar on extended just intonation and various nonstandard temperaments. We review the necessary mathematics involved in interval calculations and cent-ratio conversion. Two notational systems are introduced: Ben Johnston and HEJI (Extended Helmholtz-Ellis Just Intonation). We learn how to set up microtonal notation/playback system in Dorico and compose music inspired by our expanded awareness of pitch resources. We investigate limits of precision that can be expected in performance. In addition to composition and ear-training, we also conduct in-depth analyses.

Collaborations with varied ensembles and performers from around the world and here at Princeton, presented in concert on the Princeton Sound Kitchen concert series.

Under the direction of a faculty member, and in collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of students, visitors, and postdocs, the student carries out a one-semester research project chosen jointly by the student and the faculty. Open to any graduate student in Music, this course provides a hands-on opportunity to learn the tools, skills, methods, and perspectives of music cognition research.

Musical instruments reside at the intersection of varied topics: sound, perception, embodiment, music theory, social values, and more; how has their design influenced the development of music and how might they be reinvented to spur new ideas? We will explore these questions through readings, listening, analysis, labs, and composition. Specific topics include: harmony and the keyboard; tuning and temperament; preparing the piano, digital and analog. More generally, we will consider the productive tension between qualitative and quantitative understandings of musical concepts.