Courses

This four-week course fulfills the requirement of basic pitch, rhythm, and score-reading skills needed for some introductory courses and 2000-level courses with prerequisites.

Full details for MUSIC 1100 - Elements of Musical Notation

Have you ever wondered: is there music in outer space? what is music's "deep history"? how do we know music when we hear it? why does it make us want to dance? does it also make us "civilized"? and how do cultural, technological, and economic forces shape why we listen, when we listen, and what we listen to? Elements of Music offers the opportunity to think about all these questions (and more) through a wide variety of hands-on musical activities: experimenting with instruments, recording and manipulating sounds from the world around us, examining medieval musical books, dancing the Twist, sweatin' to the Oldies, playing samba, improvising, singing, and above all, listening to music from around the world.

Full details for MUSIC 1101 - Elements of Music

This course offers an introduction to the history and culture of Western art music, commonly known as "classical" music. While sketching an overview of important works, events, places, figures, and movements from the medieval period up to the present day, the course will focus on providing students with the knowledge, vocabulary, and listening skills required to locate themselves in relation to this vast and diverse body of music. No previous musical experience is required.

Full details for MUSIC 1205 - Introduction to Western Art Music

A composition-based introduction to computer hardware and software for digital sound and media. Fundamentals of audio, synthesis, sequencing, and other techniques for electronic music production. Each student creates several short compositions.

Full details for MUSIC 1421 - Introduction to Computer Music

This First-Year Writing seminar provides the opportunity to write extensively about music's place in our world. Topics vary by section.

Full details for MUSIC 1701 - FWS: Sound, Sense and Ideas

Punk Culture–comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts–represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary.

Full details for MUSIC 2006 - Punk Culture: The Art and Politics of Refusal

Study of the foundations of tonal music as manifested primarily in the Western literate tradition, also incorporating examples from various vernacular idioms. The course combines modern pedagogical methods with the study of historical sources and focuses on active learning at the keyboard. Topics to be covered include rudiments such as scales and triads; melodic and harmonic principles; voice-leading strategies and schemata; species counterpoint; improvisation, including techniques of embellishment; rhythm, meter, and gesture. During sections, the concepts and skills introduced in lecture will be practiced at the keyboard as well as vocally. Other section activities include elements of musicianship (aural skills, intervallic production and identification, rhythmic accuracy and fluency, etc.); transcription; sight singing; and score reading.

Full details for MUSIC 2101 - Tonal Structure and Design in Classical, Jazz, and Popular Music I

Songwriting introduces students to the practice of songwriting through workshop-formatted classes. We will explore the ingredients of song (lyrics, melody, delivery, harmony, rhythm, form, texture, timbre, and arrangement) through analysis, composition, recording technologies, performance, and concert reports. Proficiency on one or more musical instruments is required. Songwriting can be taken as a stand-alone course or as part of the Songwriting sequence with Collaborative Songwriting.

Full details for MUSIC 2111 - Songwriting

The organ is an interdisciplinary wonder where mechanics, architecture, acoustics, religion, philosophy, literature, as well as the musical arts and sciences meet. This course uses the organ to explore music's relation to technology, history and culture, and in turn traces the technical and mechanical mysteries, and expressive possibilities, of the 'King of Instruments' across its long history. Students will gain 1) an understanding of some key aspects of musical history and repertoire; 2) a sense for the historical relation between music and technology; 3) a new knowledge of (and enthusiasm for!) the organ; and 4) an insight into the ways in which musical instruments and the musical practice associated with them are cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. With a key focus on the music of J. S. Bach, as well as on the reception of Bach's music in the 19th and 20th centuries, topics include the mechanics of organ construction, the North German organ art and the toccata, virtuosity and the use of the feet, the symphonic organ in the 19th century, 20th-century experimentation with organ sound, the organ and film. The course combines lectures with practical studio-style sessions at Cornell's four superb organs, and unprecedented access to those instruments. No prior musical experience necessary, although those interested (and with some keyboard skills) will have the opportunity to learn to play – with both hands and feet.

Full details for MUSIC 2244 - The Music, Art, and Technology of the Organ

This workshop in music journalism will sharpen your prose, your mind, and your tongue. We'll read the work of great journalists of the past and present who've written ardently and unforgettably about music - Joseph Addison, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, George Bernard Shaw, Paul Griffiths, Greil Marcus, Stanley Crouch, and Alex Ross, among others. Thus inspired, we'll dive into the vibrant musical scene of Cornell and beyond, each participant writing weekly pieces for the class blog, whose title and format will be determined by class members. In the course of the semester each student will accumulate a substantial portfolio of journalism, and stroke a love of writing about music.

Full details for MUSIC 2311 - The Art and Craft of Music Journalism

Full details for MUSIC 2321 - Groove: Black Music Theory

This course combines hands-on instruction in gamelan, Indonesia's most prominent form of traditional music, and the academic study of the broader range of music found in contemporary Indonesia, including Western-oriented and hybrid popular forms. Students thus engage with music directly, and use it as a lens to examine the myriad social and cultural forces that shape it, and that are shaped by it.

Full details for MUSIC 2341 - Gamelan in Indonesian History and Cultures

An introduction to fundamental jazz theory, technique, and applied skills.

Full details for MUSIC 3111 - Jazz Improvisation and Theory I

This course introduces fundamentals of conducting, including, but not limited to, gesture and movement; score reading, analysis, and interpretation; ear training; and historical practices. Students explore these topics in a variety of musical contexts, including orchestral, wind ensemble, choral, and mixed chamber ensembles. Classes are a mix of lectures, demonstrations, peer-to-peer learning activities, and frequent conducting experiences.

Full details for MUSIC 3122 - The Art of Conducting

This course offers historical, critical, and cross-cultural perspectives on music as a cause, a symptom, and a treatment of madness. Why are there so many reports of uncontrollable singing and/or dancing from medieval Europe? Why, around 1800, were women regarded as particularly susceptible to the sounds of the glass harmonica? Did certain kinds of music really cause members of the Issawa brotherhood to burn themselves with red-hot coals? In each class meeting we will investigate a number of approaches to a given mental state in the light of readings by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, historians, disability studies, scholars and medico-scientific researchers.

Full details for MUSIC 3251 - Music and Madness

What can we hear or see in a sound? Can the sound of a voice conjure traces of a body? How does sound, musical or otherwise, construct gender and race? In this course, we will consider how listening, speaking, and music operate as mechanisms of representation. We will pay particular attention to the work representations do and how they connect to systems of power and identity. From voice-overs and machine listening to reggaeton and Brazilian funk, we will examine the ways sound practices not only mirror gendered, racial, and sexual politics but also produce them. Through several case studies, we will find that the very possibilities of representations are embedded in historical contexts and the variability of media objects.

Full details for MUSIC 3316 - What's in a Sound? Gender and Race in Sound Cultures

Covering the basics of digital audio, bioacoustics, psychoacoustics and sound design, as they apply to theatre, film and music production. Students create soundscapes for text and moving image using ProTools software.

Full details for MUSIC 3431 - Sound Design

Individual instruction in voice, organ, harpsichord, piano and fortepiano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and some brass and woodwind instruments to those students advanced enough to do college-level work in these instruments. For more information about individual instruction, see the section titled Musical Instruction.

Full details for MUSIC 3511 - Individual Instruction

Individual instruction in voice, organ, harpsichord, piano and fortepiano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and some brass and woodwind instruments to those students advanced enough to do college-level work in these instruments. For more information about individual instruction, see the section titled Musical Instruction.

Full details for MUSIC 3513 - Individual Instruction

Individual instruction in voice, organ, harpsichord, piano and fortepiano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and some brass and woodwind instruments to those students advanced enough to do college-level work in these instruments. For more information about individual instruction, see the section titled Musical Instruction.

Full details for MUSIC 3514 - Individual Instruction

A nationally renowned choral ensemble and vibrant student-driven organization specializing in repertoire for sopranos and altos. Collaborates frequently with the Glee Club to present mixed-voice repertoire and major works. Tours and records annually. 

Full details for MUSIC 3602 - Chorus

A nationally renowned choral ensemble and vibrant student-driven organization specializing in repertoire for tenors and basses. Collaborates frequently with the Chorus to present mixed-voice repertoire and major works. Tours and records annually.

Full details for MUSIC 3603 - Glee Club

A course for singers wishing to develop their musicianship, sight-reading, and vocal technique.  The Chorale is a performing ensemble, and is focused on the development of essential skills to a high level, preparing students with the musical foundations necessary for a life in choral music.

Full details for MUSIC 3604 - Chorale

Deixa Sambar performs several styles of samba, Brazil's national music. Members need not have prior background in music-making, but a good sense of rhythm is desirable. Members include students as well as Ithaca community members, brasileiros as well as newcomers to Brazilian culture. Rehearsals develop playing skills, with a deep emphasis on cultural understanding of this vital, community-based music.

Full details for MUSIC 3609 - Brazilian Ensemble - Deixa Sambar

Performs the traditional repertoire of Central Javanese gamelan.

Full details for MUSIC 3610 - Cornell Gamelan Ensemble

The Cornell Steel Band explores the wide variety of music for an orchestra of instruments fashioned from 55-gallon oil drums, and an "engine room" of non-pitched percussion. Interwoven into the focus on hands-on practice is reflection on the meanings of steel band, historically and in the present, in its native Trinidad and Tobago and here in the United States. Formal musical training is not necessary, though a sense of rhythm and a good ear are helpful.

Full details for MUSIC 3613 - Cornell Steel Band

This course is open to experienced rappers, beatmakers, and vocalists interested forging collaborative relationships with other students. Taking as a foundation hip-hop's relationship to social justice, each semester we will work together to plan and record an EP on a theme or keyword chosen as a group. We will construct and analyze playlists of inspirational material, identifying specific hip-hop compositional strategies for creating beats and rhymes on a theme, and will use these tools to create and workshop our own collaborative tracks in weekly meetings. Please contact the instructor to audition.  

Full details for MUSIC 3616 - Cornell Hip-Hop Collective

This course will provide its members an engaging and vigorous orchestral experience where they will expand their knowledge and enjoyment of advanced repertoire with like-minded musicians. CSO is committed to offering rich concert programming experiences through major works of the orchestral canon as well as groundbreaking works representing music of our time. The primary objective of the course is to achieve a learning outcome that is student and ensemble driven, strengthening the confidence and artistic depth of each musician.

Full details for MUSIC 3621 - Cornell Symphony Orchestra

The Cornell Wind Symphony unites student musicians in an ensemble dedicated to the study and performance of emerging and traditional wind repertoire.  The Cornell Wind Symphony unites student musicians in an ensemble dedicated to the study and performance of emerging and traditional wind repertoire. In Spring 2021, the Wind Symphony will likely make music in both in-person and remote settings. Full details and audition instructions will be posted on www.cuwinds.com as they become available.

Full details for MUSIC 3631 - Cornell Wind Symphony

The Cornell Percussion Ensemble studies and performs un-conducted percussion chamber music from the rapidly expanding repertoire. Utilizing the stylistic and sonic variety that is unique to the medium, the ensemble performs music from the relatively young canon, including classics by Iannis Xenakis and Steve Reich, as well as many pieces composed within the past few years. Members of the ensemble will develop strategic listening and communication techniques through the study of percussion chamber works and mixed chamber ensemble pieces, while advancing their interpretative and technical skills. Prior experience with percussion instruments is required, and participants must meet with the instructor for a short audition before enrolling.

Full details for MUSIC 3634 - Cornell Percussion Group

The Music Improvisation Ensemble provides students with the opportunity to explore the elements of music from an improviser's perspective. This ensemble is open to any level of musician. An audition is required at the beginning of the semester simply as a means of introduction. Please contact instructor Annie Lewandowski for more information: apl72@cornell.edu.

Full details for MUSIC 3660 - Music Improvisation Ensemble

Intended primarily for music majors, this option allows students enrolled in an approved 1000- or 2000-level 3-credit music history course to pursue independent research and writing projects. Students will study various topics in music history at a more advanced level through supplementary reading, discussion, and writing, by arrangement with the professor.

Full details for MUSIC 3901 - Supplemental Study in Music

Co-requisite for new members of Cornell Chorus and Glee Club, based on audition, and open to all students regardless of participation in an ensemble. Recommended for singers at all levels wishing to improve musicianship skills. Foundational and advanced approaches to choral sight-singing, aural skills, diction, score reading, and vocal topics.

Full details for MUSIC 3902 - Choral Musicianship

Based on the holdings of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, this course will be based on encounters with organs, clavichords, harpsichords, pianos, and synthesizers. In approaching them, we will treat the term "keyboard" as both a noun and a verb: like "skateboard" or "snowboard," it can represent both an object and ways of interacting with it. Students will situate each instrument within geographical and historical ecologies that acknowledge the origins of its materials, the labor that brought it into being, the play that has animated it, the repertoire that has sustained it, and the people it has connected. Over the course of the semester, each student will define and pursue a substantial research project based on a single instrument.

Full details for MUSIC 4241 - Historical Keyboarding

Making Sound Futures is a transdisciplinary, transformative, hands-on studio course that nurtures curiosity and promotes experimentation, intuitive decision-making, and risk-taking. Embracing imperfection and uncertainty, we will construct sonic instruments to facilitate self-discovery, promote understanding of others, inspire imaginative exploration, and serve as a tools for problem-solving. Our activities will include close listening to sounds and then designing new instruments, individually and collaboratively, to recreate these sounds and others that have not yet been imagined. Raising awareness about how we contribute toward the future, we will devote ourselves to creating materials and techniques that the next generation of students can use and develop further. We will aim to generate designs for the future that are themselves open to reuse and reimagination.

Full details for MUSIC 4412 - Making Sound Futures

Individual instruction in voice, organ, harpsichord, piano and fortepiano, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and some brass and woodwind instruments to those students advanced enough to do college-level work in these instruments. For more information about individual instruction, see the section titled Musical Instruction.

Full details for MUSIC 4501 - Individual Instruction

Study and performance of classic and contemporary big band literature. Rehearsals twice a week with two to four performances per semester.

Full details for MUSIC 4615 - Jazz Ensemble

Study and performance of classic and contemporary small-group jazz.

Full details for MUSIC 4616 - Jazz Combo

The goal of this music performance course is to provide the opportunity for you as a string performer to come together with other like-minded musicians in an ensemble setting to rehearse and perform the highest quality literature from the chamber orchestra repertoire. In this course we will focus on overall concepts of self and ensemble expression, engagement, participation, and performance. We will also address musical concepts of ensemble and individual balance, blend, intonation, phrasing, dynamics, articulation, tone, rhythmic precision, color, and ensemble clarity. We are going to listen to ourselves, to each other and to the composer's voice.

Full details for MUSIC 4621 - Cornell Chamber Orchestra

Small ensembles meet weekly to explore diverse flute repertoire including a variety of instrumentation (piccolo, alto flute, bass flute).  There will be a performance opportunity at the end of the semester on a chamber concert or in a studio class setting.

Full details for MUSIC 4631 - Chamber Flute Ensemble

Concentrated instruction for students in advanced techniques of performance on Indonesian gamelan instruments.

Full details for MUSIC 4641 - Advanced Instruction in Gamelan

Study and performance of chamber music works from duos to octets, for all instruments and voice. Students will be expected to attend a one hour coaching each week and rehearse on their own as well.  There will be a final performance at the end of the semester and possible additional performance opportunities.

Full details for MUSIC 4651 - Chamber Music Ensemble

Independent study affords students the opportunity to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the independent course, must approve the proposed study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work. Students must prepare a proposal for independent study. To apply for independent study, please complete the online form.  Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Full details for MUSIC 4901 - Independent Study in Music

First semester of the two semester honors program. In conjunction with faculty, selected candidates formulate a program that allows them to demonstrate their musical and scholarly abilities, culminating in an honors thesis, composition, or recital (or some combination of these), to be presented in their senior year.

Full details for MUSIC 4911 - Honors in Music

This course explores two necessary components for advanced study and research in the discipline of music:  1) practicalities of research, including concepts, methodologies, and tools, which introduces students to social constructions of knowledge and how it is managed by libraries and archives, as well as many types of bibliographic tools, both printed and electronic; 2) critical approaches and theories of music, sound, performance, and cultural meaning, which introduces the students to key disciplinary and interdisciplinary intellectual movements and scholarly works.

Full details for MUSIC 6201 - Research and Critical Methodologies

Ever-increasing global interconnection drives some of the most pressing political and ethical questions of our time. This seminar centers on two intersecting areas of inquiry. The first deals with the nature of global movements: how people, ideas, arts, and capital move through world. Engaging postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary migration and transnationalism, we will interrogate the idea of borders and nations as well as those categories—like diaspora—that surpass or circumvent them. The second addresses how and why we might study these processes ethnographically. Here we will consider the potential and limitations of multi-sited and global ethnography, and question the possibility of an activist ethnography of global interconnection.

Full details for MUSIC 6239 - Global Currents: Immobility and Multi-Sited Ethnography

Based on the holdings of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, this course will be based on encounters with organs, clavichords, harpsichords, pianos, and synthesizers. In approaching them, we will treat the term "keyboard" as both a noun and a verb: like "skateboard" or "snowboard," it can represent both an object and ways of interacting with it. Students will situate each instrument within geographical and historical ecologies that acknowledge the origins of its materials, the labor that brought it into being, the play that has animated it, the repertoire that has sustained it, and the people it has connected. Over the course of the semester, each student will define and pursue a substantial research project based on a single instrument.

Full details for MUSIC 6241 - Historical Keyboarding

From Switched-On Bach to Synthpop and EDM, since the late 1960s electronic synthesizers have expanded the sonic palette and identity formation of popular musicians, leading to new concepts of sound and performance as well as communal, technological, and human interfaces. This course will explore the cultural history of analog synthesizers and their progeny of digital devices (samplers, sequencers, drum machines) and desktop technologies that revolutionized popular music soundscapes and embodiment. Synthesis will be considered as both a musical technology and theoretical concept that together spark imagined cyborg identities and post-human futures, challenging and resynthesizing categories of gender, sexuality, and race. Student will also have the opportunity to engage with Cornell's Robert Moog Archive and develop research, creative, or curation projects. This course is open to graduate students and fourth-year undergraduates by permission. Undergraduates should contact the instructor before enrolling.

Full details for MUSIC 6312 - Synthesizing Pop: Electronics and the Musical Imagination

Making Sound Futures is a transdisciplinary, transformative, hands-on studio course that nurtures curiosity and promotes experimentation, intuitive decision-making, and risk-taking. Embracing imperfection and uncertainty, we will construct sonic instruments to facilitate self-discovery, promote understanding of others, inspire imaginative exploration, and serve as a tools for problem-solving. Our activities will include close listening to sounds and then designing new instruments, individually and collaboratively, to recreate these sounds and others that have not yet been imagined. Raising awareness about how we contribute toward the future, we will devote ourselves to creating materials and techniques that the next generation of students can use and develop further. We will aim to generate designs for the future that are themselves open to reuse and reimagination.

Full details for MUSIC 6412 - Making Sound Futures

A course for graduate or advanced undergraduate composers (by permission with a portfolio audition) seeking individual music composition instruction, the course combines one-on-one meetings with group seminars featuring workshops, master classes, and/or visiting guests. In addition to individual and group meetings, composers may have opportunities for the reading and/or performance of their work.

Full details for MUSIC 7111 - Composition

Entering the lexicon of European philosophy in the 1700s, aesthetics attempted to name and analyze a particular kind of experience, judgment, object, or value. Its questions have been extended, critiqued, reformulated, and dismissed in the centuries since. In this seminar, we will read important texts in modern aesthetic theory (Hume, Kant), as well as some notable critiques that followed, from philosophy itself (Shusterman, Roelofs, Ngai) and from sociology (Bourdieu, Wolff). We will also consider two unavoidable questions for modern/colonial aesthetics: what to do with the so-called primitive art of non-European cultures (Boas) and how to understand the challenge of Black aesthetics in the twentieth century (Locke, Baraka, Wynter).

Full details for MUSIC 7362 - Musical Value: Histories of Aesthetics

Independent study affords students the opportunity to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the independent course, must approve the proposed study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

Full details for MUSIC 7901 - Independent Study in Music