All Courses
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THEORY 460 001 FA 2018
"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.
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RUSSIAN 220 001 FA 2018
This course looks at the new Russia, which emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that new Russia’s relationship to literature – at the new kinds of writing, new markets, new means of distribution and new roles for writers. The course will examine the way that writers responded to transformation, crisis, and the creation of a new socio-political and economic environment for literature. Belles lettres dealing with old and new issues (among them: the situation of Russian women, the fate of the Russian countryside and the Russian provinces, new and not-so-new ideas about sexuality, Russia’s ethnic diversity, Russia’s relationship to its history and religion(s)) will be read and the position of authors discussed.