Composer's Forum is a regular meeting of graduate composers, often along with other members of the Penn composing community, in which recent performances are discussed, musical issues taken up, and visitors occasionally welcomed to present their work or offer master classes. In addition to weekly Forum meetings, students will be paired with a composer for individual lessons in composition. Ph.d. Candidates in Composition in their third year in the program will continue non-credit participation in both forum and lessons.

This course focuses on the ethics, politics, and practice of ethnography. Topics may include: fieldwork methods; collaborative practice; ethnography and the archive; power and subjectivity; multimodal approaches; reciprocity and questions of accessibility; oral histories; experimental ethnography; and the politics of transcription, inscription, and translation. Students will begin to put these methodological ideas into practice by developing semester-long ethnographic projects. These projects can be individual or collaborative partnerships, and might also connect students to ongoing community-based research.

Students will study a variety of hardware and software used in making electronic music. Historical and contemporary practices will be analyzed. Creative projects will be completed. Please see department website https://music.sas.upenn.edu/courses for current term course descriptions.

Long before the groundbreaking release of Beyoncé's Renaissance album in 2022, Black club music and culture had been thriving in the United States. In this course, we will examine the historical development and contemporary significance of Black urban club music and party cultures across the United States. From the post-emancipation era, where Black nightlife economies began to flourish, to the ongoing struggle of the "decolonize the dancefloor" movement in the present day, this course will reveal silenced and concealed narratives of Black electronic dance music. These narratives challenge the predominantly white, male, heterosexual EDM industry and the scholarly literature that surrounds it.

Throughout the semester, we will map out a dynamic Black urban club music ecosystem, with a special focus on club music scenes in Newark, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. We will also engage with various sub-styles and localities, such as Chicago house, Detroit techno, NYC ballroom, New Orleans bounce, and Miami bass. Our explorations will draw from a wide range of academic disciplines, including (ethno)musicology, gender and sexuality, Black cultural production, urban geography, performance, and dance studies. Furthermore, we will contextualize these themes and issues within broader historical, social, cultural, and geographical settings. Course activities will include critical discussion, reading, writing and listening exercises. Overall, this course will demonstrate the essential role of Black places, people, and sound in shaping club music cultures not only in the United States but also around the world.

Music Majors and Minors will be given preference during advance registration period.

Please email professor Jasmine Henry for permission henryja@sas.upenn.edu

What role does music play in articulating religious identities and spaces? What is the importance of ritual musics as they persist and change in the modern world? How does music reflect and articulate religious ways of thinking and acting? In this course, we explore these and other questions about the interrelations between music, religion, and ritual in South and Southeast Asia. Focusing on India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the course emphasizes musics from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Christian traditions; nevertheless, it draws widely to touch upon sacred musics in Pakistan, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and among some indigenous peoples in the region. Throughout, we explore ontologies of sound; sonic occurrences in religious structures, public processions, and pilgrimage sites; the construction of religion and ritual as ideas forged through colonial encounter and modern scholarship on religion; the politics of sacred sounds in today's public spaces and contemporary media, such as television and online; and the surprising fluidity between popular and sacred musical genres.

MUSC3200 offers an introduction to electronic music/sound production with a focus on modular hardware systems and performance. Guest artists will join us for in-class visits and performances during the semester. Meetings will take place in the classroom, in concert spaces and in the studio. Preference given to Music majors and minors for registration.

Continuation of techniques established in Theory and Musicianship I. Explores chromatic harmony. Concepts will be developed through analysis and model composition. Musicianship component will include sight singing, clef reading, harmonic dictation and keyboard harmony.

Continuation of techniques established in Theory and Musicianship I. Explores chromatic harmony. Concepts will be developed through analysis and model composition. Musicianship component will include sight singing, clef reading, harmonic dictation and keyboard harmony.

This course aims to introduce students to what it means to study the European musical tradition. Students will approach the diverse music that constitute the classical tradition from a variety of scholarly perspectives. The goal of this class is to listen deeply and think broadly. Students will consider questions such as: what sort of object is music? Where is it located? What does it mean to say a work is "canonic"? What is left out of the story? This class will be in dialog with other tier-one classes, and will consider what the historian can bring to the study and understanding of music. Fulfills the requirements of the Music major.
Prerequisite: MUSC 1700 or 2700, or equivalent; or by permission of the instructor.
Preference given to music Majors and Minors.

This course will cover basic skills and vocabulary for reading, hearing, performing, analyzing, and writing music. Students will gain command of musical rudiments, including notation, reading and writing in treble and bass clefs, intervals, keys, scales, triads and seventh chords, and competence in basic melodic and formal analysis. The course will include an overview of basic diatonic harmony, introduction to harmonic function and tonicization. Musicianship skills will include interval and chord recognition, rhythmic and melodic dictation and familiarity with the keyboard. There will be in-depth study of selected compositions from the "common practice" Western tradition, including classical, jazz, blues and other popular examples. Listening skills--both with scores (including lead sheets, figured bass and standard notation), and without--will be emphasized. There is no prerequisite. Students with some background in music may place out of this course and into Music 170, Theory and Musicianship I. Fulfills College Formal Reasoning and Analysis Foundational Requirement.