Recent, Current, and Planned Courses
Rhode Island (and Rhode Island College) now has a new music
ensemble, New York
System! We'll be playing lots of music from the last 30 years or
so, and we've just
commissioned works from two young composers for the spring.
Music
360, Seminar: Recent American Art Music
For spring 2007 I designed a new course for Rhode Island
College, a seminar for
advanced undergraduates. We looked at lots of new American
music, contextualized
with forays into contemporary painting, theatre, architecture, film,
avant-garde rock,
and moments of recognition of recent art music by pop culture (think
Philip Glass on
South Park.)
We also put on a class concert, performing Earle Brown's December 1952
and Terry Riley's In C
(ancient works!) on April 25. Syllabus available upon request.
For both terms of academic year 2005-6 I taught an Advanced
Composition
seminar for
undergraduates at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The
fall term syllabus
is here.
For fall 2005 I also taught the final course in the study of
tonal
harmony at UNC
(covering
advanced chromatic harmony). My syllabus is available here.
For spring 2006 at UNC my seminar for advanced undergraduates
focused on
avant-garde
music of the past 60 years. An early draft of the syllabus.
(The class--along with some
faculty ringers--performed a set of avant-garde masterworks in
concert: Cage's 4'33",
Stockhausen's "Right Durations" (Aus den sieben Tagen), and Riley's In C. --3/25/06)
Many
writers have attempted incorporating musical forms (such as
sonata-allegro
or fugue) into their novels, poems, or short stories. Many more have
attempted to
compose contrapuntal text. This is a graduate seminar to examine such
intermedial
works. (The syllabus for this proposed course is available upon
request.)
Poetry
is filled with musical elements. In this seminar for graduate composers
we
will dig into the musical elements inherent in various poems. We will
then discuss
ways of accentuating, subverting, and countering a poem's music in an
original
musical setting of the poem. Our primary text will be Robert Pinsky's The
Sounds of
Poetry. Composers will complete several short text-settings
throughout the semester,
culminating in writing a song cycle for voice and instrument(s). There
will be a
concert performance of these works, An Evening of New Song,
during reading period.
The syllabus is here.
This
is the first half of a proposed two-semester study of the techniques of
Schenkerian analysis for graduate students. The tentative syllabus is
available here.
In addition to teaching at RIC and at the University of North Carolina,
I
have
also taught
composition and theory at the University of Pittsburgh, Princeton
University, and
at Ohio
State. Brief information about some of the courses I have led at these
institutions
is available
at the links below (along with a website detailing a couple of older
proposed
composition
courses).