How is music put together? Every piece of music has a structure — from fugues, to symphonies, to pop music, to music created by generative AI systems. This course considers the different formal means by which composers (or AI systems) create music, as well as how this music was understood by listeners and later music theorists. Each week, we’ll focus on a different musical form or compositional practice and will analyze its main characteristics and historical context, and will occasionally try our hand at creating something. We will consider a variety of examples drawn from Western Art music, popular music, and even generative AI systems and musical dice games. In the process, we’ll try to understand what makes a work cohere internally, and what makes groups of pieces cohere as a group. We’ll extend these same concepts into thinking about our research and writing process: what makes a piece of writing cohere? How does an author bring different texts together to make an argument?

The focus of our attention will be three-fold: equal attention will be given to listening, reading, and writing about these musical works.