"Intensity, continuity, pacing" capture, for me, some of the ways that music creates drama and action. Pacing is speed or slowness, staying in the current moment, rushing ahead, drawing things out. Intensity can be as simple as loudness or softness or as complex as how strongly some music draws us into it. How a piece or passage "hangs together" is its continuity: a passage can move smoothly or abruptly to a succeeding passage; it can seem to contrast to a greater or lesser degree. If the terms I've chosen seem abstract, as they do to me, it is perhaps because they allude to qualities of sound that happen as time passes--qualities that can't be pinned down.

The course will center on listening and performance oriented analysis. I hope students will bring a wide spectrum of specializations, interests, and backgrounds to work with music that might range from the Renaissance through the twenty-first century.