Undergraduate Courses

Songwriters Forum is a practical writing course designed to help students become the best music creators they can be, in styles, genres, and approaches they define. While the focus tends to be on popular song, the curriculum addresses any and all songwriting. Forum students analyze, review, and, most of all, explore the tools (including collaboration) employed by composers and lyricists whose work has distinguished them as important practitioners of the art and craft of song. The goal is improved writing, with all other elements and aspects directed towards it.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

This course will explore the history & development of classic popular music of the past 60 years. Through a detailed study of 14 profoundly influential songs & recordings, we will examine how art affects, & is affected by, its cultural & historical moment. Over the course of the semester, students will engage in musical analysis, critical listening, & a detailed study of songwriting & recording
techniques. They will also view archival films of relevant musical artists, & engage in close analysis of selected musical performances.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

This course will explore the history and development of classic popular music of the past 60 years, with a focus on the period 1980-2005. Through a detailed study of 14 profoundly influential songs and recordings, we will examine how art affects, and is affected by, its cultural and historical moment. Students will engage in musical analysis, critical listening, and a detailed study of songwriting and recording techniques. They will also view archival video of relevant musical artists, films, and news events and engage in close analysis of select musical performances.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

Sound Design

This course investigates cultural influence and exchange between Africa, the African diaspora, Europe and America with a particular emphasis on sound and music. How has the sound of Africa been transcribed, recorded, stored, transported, and represented in the West? What can this tell us about global cultural flow? How do specific recording techniques articulate with global music markets? The course analyzes the transatlantic feedback between Africa, America and Europe; evaluates the politics of transcription, ethnographic description, and recording; and examines the changing role for traditional African music in a global world.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

Explores how people form relationships with locales they occupy, how they attach meanings to spaces to create places, and how experiences of inhabiting, viewing, and hearing those places shape their meanings, communicative practices, cultural performances, memories, and habits. Themes include: mapping and the imagination; vision and space, soundscape, architecture and landscape; new media and space/time compression; space and identity; spatial violence; and spatialization of memory. Satisfies Core Cultures & Contexts for non-MCC Steinhardt students.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication
• Liberal Arts Core: Cultures and Contexts

This course explores the power of oral storytelling as a means of self-excavation and community building. It offers students a survey of the history of oral storytelling as well as existing research on the relationship between storytelling and identity/community development. The course also serves as an intensive workshop, wherein students will learn from seasoned, award-winning storytellers in guest lectures; practice the art and craft of oral storytelling in a small group of their peers; and prepare and eventually perform a personal story of their own.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

The objective of this course is to develop a broad understanding of the process in which typically developing children acquire speech & language skills. The complexities of normal human communication will be focused upon which will lay the foundation for discussing speech sound acquisition & language development from the prelinguistic stage to the school age period. Theoretical aspects of speech & language development will be reviewed.

• Department: Communicative Sciences and Disorders

Theories of light and lighting. The practice of lighting the stage. Experiments with light as a design element. Laboratory experience is required.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

Comprehensive, practical course in the various technical aspects of theatrical production. Fall term explores the planning, construction, and painting of scenery and the architecture of the stage. Spring term deals with stage electrics, lighting, crafts, sound technology, and special effects. Three additional hours of laboratory a week.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

An introductory quantitative & statistical reasoning course designed to help students acquire statistical literacy & competency to survive in a data-rich world. The course introduces students to basic concepts in probability, research design, descriptive statistics, & simple predictive models to help them to become more savvy consumers of the information they will routinely be exposed to in their personal, academic & professional lives. Course material will be conveyed through video clips, case studies, puzzle solving, predictive competitions, & group discussions.

Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Quantitative Reasoning for some Steinhardt students; students should check with their Academic Advisor for confirmation.

• Department: Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities
• Liberal Arts Core: Quantitative Reasoning

Not Available.

Not Available.

Introduction to the legal environment as it pertains to profit-making music & to ethical considerations as well as social & political influences. Emphasis on copyright law & contract law as they affect the economics of the music industry.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

Introduction to the legal environment as it pertains to profit-making music
& to ethical considerations as well as social & political influences.
Emphasis on copyright law & contract law as they affect the economics of
the music industry.

This course is designed to provide aspiring music professionals with positive practices to deal with pressures to succeed, performance anxiety, fear of failure, and the challenges that affect the confidence it takes to know how to make a life and living in music and the performing arts. Using a structured set of tipping points,
readings and creative assignments, learners develop skills that apply to their academic life, internships and careers.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

Instrumental Performance juries assess each student’s growth in instrumental techniques including intonation, rhythm, tone production, articulation, dynamics, and musicality. Juries take place at a designated time at the end of the semester and are evaluated by each student’s program director and any additional invited faculty. Jury repertoire is selected in conversation with each student’s private teacher, and
each student studies their jury repertoire in their private lessons.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

A review of fingerings and positions for violin, viola, cello and double bass playing and composition. Examination and performance of scores written for strings. Projects in composition for strings throughout the semester.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

Private lessons for music majors and minors meet once a week, following a syllabus, course is focused on improving technical and relaxation methods used in performances, teacher is leading a student through various music styles baroque, romanticism and 20th Century music combining it with the scales and etudes. Students are studying master-pieces different from NYU classes.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

Open to departmental undergraduate students majoring in music. Private lessons covering string repertoire in all styles & forms, supplemented by outside assignments. Jury examination at end of the second semester required.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions