Music (MUS) 1A-B-C
Musical Literacy
The intent of this year-long course is to develop listening abilities through a conceptual understanding of the structure of music, together with listening exercises and techniques. Topics include musical notation, melodic transcription, scales, chords, intervals, keys, rhythm, meter, and elements of musical form. The sequence is primarily intended for non-majors.
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Music (MUS) 4 plus two courses from 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13AF, 13AM, 13AS, 14, or 1b5
MUS 4: Introduction to Western Music
A brief survey of the history of Western music from the Middle Ages to the present. Much attention will be paid to the direct experience of listening to music and attendance of concerts. Class consists of lectures, listening labs, and live performances.
MUS 8: American Music
Music 8 is designed to study the development of music in America. The focus will be both on the vernacular traditions including hymn singing, country music, jazz, blues, big band, rock, etc., as well as the cultivated traditions of various composers from William Billings to John Cage.
MUS 9: Symphony
Music 9 will consist of lectures and listening sessions devoted to a detailed discussion of a small number of recognized masterworks (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, etc.).
MUS 10: Chamber Music
Music 10 will consist of lectures and listening sessions devoted to a detailed discussion of recognized Chamber masterworks (e.g., Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok, etc.).
MUS 11: Folk and Popular Music
A course on folk and popular musics of the world, all geographic regions. Folk and/or popular music will be covered through lectures, films, and listening sessions devoted to detailed discussion of music indigenous to varying cultures/areas of the world.
MUS 12: Opera
Music 12 will consist of lectures, listening labs, and films. An in-depth discussion of five operas written between 1642-1925 by Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, Bizet, and Berg is included. Assigned readings and listening to materials on reserve in the Central Library prepares students for class presentations. Attendance at a selection of concerts and related events is required. Critiques on specific subjects are written, corrected, and discussed.
MUS 13AF: World Music/Africa
A course that focuses on the music of Africa and on African ways of music-making in the Diaspora to the Caribbean and South America. No prior technical knowledge of music is necessary.
MUS 13AM: World Music/Multicultural America
A study of music cultures in the United States, particularly Native American, Hispanic American, European American, and Asian American, and Pacific Islanders from the perspective of ethnicity, origin, interaction, and the contribution of various ethnic groups to American musical life. No prior technical knowledge of music is necessary.
MUS 13AS: World Music/Asia and Oceania
Introduction to selected performance traditions of Asia and Oceania with links to local and visiting musicians from these cultures. No prior technical knowledge of music is necessary.
MUS 14: Contemporary Music
This course offers opportunities to prepare oneself for experiences in new music (through preview lectures), to hear performances (by visiting or faculty artists), and to discuss each event informally with a faculty panel in an effort to foster informed listening to the new in music.
MUS 15: Popular Music
A course on popular music from different time periods, covered through lectures, films, and listening sessions. Topics vary from year to year.
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Music (MUS) 5, 7, 14
MUS 5: Introduction to Music Making
This course is designed to discover musical potential and expand musical experience. No knowledge of music, notation, or instrumental skill is necessary. Small lab sessions present music through composing, improvising, and performing. Results take the form of works for tapes, theatre, voices, or instruments.
MUS 7: Music, Science, and Computers
An exploration of the interactions among music, science, and technology, including the development and history of science and technology from the perspective of music and the modern resynthesis of these disciplines occurring around computers.
MUS 14: Contemporary Music
This course is described in the preceding sequence.
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Theatre/General (TDGE) 1 plus two courses from Theatre/Acting (TDAC) 1, Theatre/Design (TDDE) 1, Theatre/General (TDGE) 10 or Theatre/Playwriting (TDPW 1)
TDGE 1: Introduction to Theatre
An introduction to fundamental concepts in drama and performance. Students will attend performances and learn about how the theatre functions as an art and as an industry in today's world.
TDAC 1: Introduction to Acting
A beginning course in the fundamentals of acting: establishing a working vocabulary and acquiring the basic skills of the acting process. Through exercises, compositions and improvisations, the student actor explores the imagination as the actor's primary resource, and the basic approach to text through action.
TDDE 1: Introduction to Design for the Theatre
A survey of contemporary and historical concepts and practices in the visual arts of the theatre; studies in text analysis, studio processes, and technical production; elementary work in design criticism. A course serving non-majors as an introduction to theatre and majors as the first step in the design and production course sequence.
TDGE 10: Theatre and Film
Theatre and Film analyzes the essential differences between theatrical and cinematic approaches to drams. Through selected play/film combinations, the course looks at how the director uses actors and the visual languages of the stage and screen to guide and stimulate the audience's response.
TDPW: Introduction to Playwriting
A workshop designed to liberate the dramatic imagination. Students develop character and action through a variety of individual and group exercises that involve activities such as real-world observation, acting improvisations, or written work.
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Theatre/History (TDHT) 10, 21, 22, 23 (choose three)
Survey of Dramatic Literature
TDHT 10: Introduction to Play Analysis
An introduction to the fundamental techniques of analyzing dramatic texts. Focus is on the student's ability to describe textual elements and their relationships to each other as well as on strategies for writing critically about drama. Prerequisites: none.
TDHT 21 Performance Dynamics:
Spaces, Performers, and Audiences This course introduces the basic parameters of performance dynamics by exploring varieties of performance space, of acting methods, and of actor-audience relations, comparing examples drawn from different historical periods and world cultures.
TDHT 22 One actor, Two or More: How Theatre Peoples the World:
This course explores how theatre uses one, two, or many actors to project personal and social identities and relationships, comparing examples from different cultures and historical periods.
TDHT 23 Social Contexts of Performance
The functions and meaning of theatre depend in part on the social contexts of performance. This quarter looks at performance modes associated with court spectacles, commercial venues, and popular theatre, comparing examples from different cultures and historical periods.
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Visual Arts (VIS) 1, 2, or 3 (choose two) plus 111
Introduction to Art Making
VIS 1: Introduction to Art Making: Two-Dimensional Practices
An introduction to concepts and techniques of art-making with specific reference to the artists and issues of the 20th century. Lectures and studio classes will examine the nature of images in relation to various themes. Drawing, painting, found objects and texts will be employed to construct a series of projects generated from visual and narrative sources. Prerequisite: none required.
VIS 2: Introduction to Art Making: Motion and Time-Based Art
An introduction to the process of art-making utilizing transactions between people, objects, and situations. Includes both critical reflection on relevant aspects of avant-garde art of the last two decades (Duchamp, Cage, Rauschenberg, Gertrude Stein, conceptual art, happenings, etc.) and practical experience in a variety of artistic exercises. Prerequisite: none required.
VIS 3: Introduction to Art Making: Three-Dimensional Practices
An introduction to art-making that uses as ts base the idea of the "conceptual." The lecture exists as a bank of knowledge about various art world and non-art world conceptual plays: mapping, ear`1thworks, special concepts, conceptual art, decoration, taste. The studio section attempts to incorporate these ideas into individual and group projects using any "material." Prerequisite: none required.
VIS 111: The Structure of Art
The course is based on the assumption that if an art work "means something" we should be able to articulate the way or the ways in which it manages to mean it.
The course begins with an analysis of drawings by a wide variety of artists, including Durer, Rembrandt, Flaxman, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, and Hokusai.
Photography is the next mode considered and covers a wide range of historical and contemporary photographs from Adamson and Hill to Friedlander and Robert Cumming. Discussion of the central issue of "framing" generalized as an idea of synecdoche or metonymy, in which a single framed "scene" is used to stand for some state of affairs or some event of which it is a part.
Painted and photographic portraits are examined, some sculpture portraits as well if time permits.
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Visual Arts (VIS) 20, 21, 22, 111 (choose three)
Art History and Criticism
Through the study of art history, students learn to treat works of art as manifestations of human belief, thought, and experience in Western and non-Western societies from pre-history to the present day. Courses in criticism review the theoretical approaches which are used to understand artistic achievement. By combining art historical and critical study, the program promotes in the student an awareness of the cultural traditions which have shaped his or her intellectual outlook and provides a framework for informed judgment on the crucial issues of meaning and expression in contemporary society.
VIS 20: Introduction to Art History
Works of art are tools through which humanity has struggled to understand and deal with the world, with society, and with the self. This course provides an overview of the development of Western art and architecture through such defining issues as the respective roles of tradition and innovation in the production and appreciation of art, the relation of art to its broader intellectual and historical contexts, and the changing concepts of the monument, the artist, meaning, style, and 'art' itself. Representative examples will be selected from different periods ranging from Antiquity to Modern.
VIS 21A: Introduction to the Art of the Americas or Africa and Oceania
Course offers a comparative and thematic approach to the artistic achievements and of societies with widely divergent structures and political organizations from the ancient Americas to Africa and the Pacific Islands. Topics vary with the interests and expertise of the instructor.
VIS 21B: Introduction to Asian Art
Survey of the major artistic trends of India, China, and Japan, taking a topical approach to important developments in artistic style and subject matter to highlight the art of specific cultures and religions.
VIS 22: Formations of Modern Art
In later eighteenth century Europe, the cultural and political upheavals of the American, French, and early Industrial Revolutions provoked such artists as Goya, Blake, and David to produce daring works which broke with academic painting. From then on, the world and the arts changed rapidly, and along with them the nature of the art audience and art market: a new middle-class art public emerged as did the new structures of museums, galleries,and criticism. Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism-represented by such artists as Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Bonheur, Degas, Cassatt, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rodin, and Cezanne-developed under these new economic, political, and artistic circumstances.
During the twentieth century, bold experiments with new techniques of representation such as Fauvism (Matisse) and Cubism (Picasso, Braque, Robert, and Sonia Delaunay), with abstraction (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich), and in Dada and Surrealism (Duchamp, Miro, Fini, Dali) with the energies of the irrational and the unconscious succeeded and interacted upon one another, posing new questions about the nature of art and the role of the artist in society. Architectural practice and theory was transformed by the coming of the International Style and the teachings of the Bauhaus.
The course will end with a study of art since World War II, including American Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Krasner, de Kooning), the subsequent international movements of Pop, Minimal, Conceptual, Performance and New Image Art, and the recent questioning of the established history and institutions of art by the Third World and Women's Art Movements.
VIS 111: The Structure of Art
The course is based on the assumption that if an art work "means something" we should be able to articulate the way or the ways in which it manages to mean it.
The course begins with an analysis of drawings by a wide variety of artists, including Durer, Rembrandt, Flaxman, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, and Hokusai.
Photography is the next mode considered and covers a wide range of historical and contemporary photographs from Adamson and Hill to Friedlander and Robert Cumming. Discussion of the central issue of "framing" generalized as an idea of synecdoche or metonymy, in which a single framed "scene" is used to stand for some state of affairs or some event of which it is a part.
Painted and photographic portraits are examined, some sculpture portraits as well if time permits.
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Visual Arts (VIS) 22, 84, 154
Film Sequence
Visual Arts 84 must be taken before Visual Arts 154.
VIS 22: Formaions of Modern Art
This course is described in the Visual Arts 20, 21, 22, 111 sequence.
VIS 84: History of Film
A survey of the history and the art of the cinema. The course will stress the origin of cinema and the contributions of the earliest filmmakers, including those of Europe, Russia, and the United States. Materials fee required.
VIS 154: Hard Look at the Movies
Examines a choice of films, selected along different lines of analysis coherent within the particular premise of the course. Films are selected from different periods and genres among Hollywood, European, and Third World countries. Prerequisite: Visual Art 84
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