Creating Music, Composing Worlds

Catalog description

" Any great work of art " revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world "" Leonard Bernstein. "This class will explore the connection between the history of ideas and composing music. Through the use of digital tools for music creation, students will explore the interplay between music, and other arts including but not limited to: painting, writing, poetry, as well as sciences, math, and history. The class will explore music as a form of thought, as a technical practice, as language and as art. We will examine music from diverse eras and styles such as Gregorian chant, electronic dance music, minimalism, twelve-tone, rap, rock and hip-hop. "Students will compose musical responses to selected readings that demonstrate how experiences gained in one area can be useful to another. This class will also provide students with a foundation in music theory, music production, notation and composition. "Selected readings in the class will include Music, Beauty & the Brain (Part 2): The Golden Mean in Music, American Mathematical Society, Silence , John Cage, Visual and Acoustic Space , Marshall McLuhan, Ambient Music , Brian Eno, The Theory and Practice of Electronic Music , Miller Puckette, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons , Igor Stravinsky, Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture , Susan McClary, The Sound Studies Reader , Jonathan Sterne.