Goals and Objectives for Majors
Overarching Goal:
The ability to think in music and to think about music.
Objectives:
- To gain familiarity with a range of different musical practices and traditions, including selected Western classical, American popular, and non-Western practices.
- To learn to create (perform and compose), and analyze music.
- To learn to think about cultural, historical, and cognitive dimensions of music.
- To develop the ability for sustained thinking in or about music.
Means for meeting objectives:
Successful completion of:
- MUS 210 (Classical Music in Western Culture), and a cultural musicology course in the field of music of the Americas.
- A four-semester music theory sequence.
- MUS 212 (Introduction to Ethnomusicology)
- A music thesis project, in either composition, performance, or cultural musicology.
Concentration-specific objectives, requiring further development of the above general goals and objectives:
Composition Concentration
Objectives:
- Successful completion of a portfolio of original compositions demonstrating familiarity with vocal, instrumental, and electroacoustic genres, and with computer notation software.
- Demonstrated skill in writing about music.
Means for meeting objectives:
- Successful completion of MUS 235 (Music Composition)
- Successful completion of MUS 237 (Computers, Music, and the Arts)
- Successful completion of two other courses in composition or orchestration
- A thesis that involves a performed composition in the general range of 10’ for chamber orchestra, 15’ for chamber ensembles, or 20’ for solos with accompaniment or synthesized sound; and includes a 15-20 page written component comprised of an analysis of the music and a survey of its historical context.
Performance Concentration
Objectives:
- Direct experience with a variety of music performance styles and media.
- Demonstrated skill in music performance at a level appropriate for a public recital.
- Demonstrated skill in writing about music.
Means for meeting objectives:
- Successful completion of MUS 220 or s26 (Performance in Western Classical Music)
- Successful completion of MUS 222 (Jazz Performance Workshop)
- Successful completion of four semesters of Applied Music
- Successful completion of four semester of faculty-led ensemble appropriate to the student’s applied music study
- Successful completion of two semesters in a different faculty-led ensemble (different instrumental or vocal medium)
- Faculty approved, 30-minute juried recital prior to end of junior year
- Thesis: full length recital in senior year with significant written component
Cultural Musicology Concentration
Objectives:
- The development of critical, analytical, and articulatory skills required for scholarship in music.
- An understanding of the embeddedness of music in sociocultural processes, and of music as the performance of culture.
Means for meeting objectives:
- Successful completion of a Junior-Senior seminar
- Successful completion of three other music courses (one of which may be a course pertinent to their interests offered in another department or program)
- A senior thesis that successfully demonstrates the development of skills required for scholarship in music.