William Harper

This course is offered for those students interested in developing skills in the creation and application of digital audio. Using Apple's Logic software, students interested in exploring sound or music are introduced to audio manipulation techniques that allow them to create soundtracks, to record and produce songs or dance tracks, realize abstract sound pieces or manipulate sound for installations. Techniques of sound manipulation are introduced, including audio recording and editing, looping, and sound destruction. MIDI, drum programming, the use of software synthesis and basic music and composition techniques are addressed according to the needs of individual students. The class is structured to encourage the interaction of students with a wide range of technical ability in audio from beginners to advanced artists in the early stages of a professional practice.

Alternative Image Capture investigates emerging imaging technology. AI image making and animation, 3D Camera, monitor and projection systems, action cameras, trail cams, IP equipped video, smart phone, infrared, thermal, and DSLR cameras will be used to collect primary images, video and audio material. Further exploration will include methods of processing and distribution of still and animated imagery. The ultimate shape of the course will be informed by breaking technology and the interests of the students in the class.

This course is offered for those students interested in developing skills in the creation and application of digital audio. Using Apple's Logic software, students interested in exploring sound or music are introduced to audio manipulation techniques that allow them to create soundtracks, to record and produce songs or dance tracks, realize abstract sound pieces or manipulate sound for installations. Techniques of sound manipulation are introduced, including audio recording and editing, looping, and sound destruction. MIDI, drum programming, the use of software synthesis and basic music and composition techniques are addressed according to the needs of individual students. The class is structured to encourage the interaction of students with a wide range of technical ability in audio from beginners to advanced artists in the early stages of a professional practice.

In this course, we will explore the music of dance, opera, and concert stage created in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. These music-based art forms emerged in the midst of two massively destructive and disruptive world wars, a deadly worldwide pandemic, and a multitude of revolutionary artistic, political, and social movements. The radical music forms share space with the visual arts of the era. Impressionism, primitivism, historic nationalism, neo-classicism, futurism are terms used to categorize both music and art. We will investigate how these movements bring to life the underlying currents, stresses, and archetypal impulses at play in aspects of this dynamic European cultural context. Our screenings will include performances of orchestral works by Claude Debussy, Anton Webern, and Olivier Messiaen, operas by Giacomo Puccini and Johann Strauss, ballets by Igor Stravinsky and Eric Satie and performances of pieces created for experimental electronic and mechanical instruments. We will read primary sources such as A Futurist Manifesto by Luigi Russolo and writing by composers of the music we study such as The Poetics of Music by Igor Stravinksy. Our assignments consist of graphic musical analyses, first person writing on your musical experiences, at home screening, listening and reading, and a final essay on the nature of Western music.

Selected issues in music and related areas are studied. Topics vary each semester and may include (but are not limited to): musical structure and form, aural literacy, opera studies, music and words, music and the visual arts, history of recorded music, history of the oral tradition, semiotics, communications theory, and others.

Often called the ultimate art form, the operatic spectacles of music, storytelling, and ritual were at the core of varying European cultures during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As such, they influenced and generated many innovations in literature, fashion, visual arts, dance, and music. In this course, we will screen operas such as Mozart?s Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute; the 'gesamtkunstwerk' operas of Wagner such as The Ring of the Nibelungen and Parsifal; examples of the French 'Opera Comique' such as Bizet's Carmen; the Italian opera of Verdi, La Traviata and Rigoletto; the 'verisimo' operas of Puccini, La Boheme, Il Trittico, and Madame Butterfly; and Strauss' radical, early 20th century operas Salome and Elektra. We will also encounter contemporary operas by Kaija Saariaho, Meredith Monk, Phillip Glass and John Adams. The primary resources for our studies are the operas themselves. We will screen operas during each class, review the social and historical contexts for the operas, and examine the compositional and scenographic techniques of the various productions. Course work will include a short paper on each of the works screened and a mid-term and final exam on selected arias from the operas.