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

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 & 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

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

Course Description: This course focuses on three important areas in music technology: spatialization, computer aided composition, analysis and synthesis techniques. In each area, concepts and implementations will be explored in a variety of artistic and technological contexts. Students will work with the latest technologies including IRCAM Tools, Spat plugin, Max Bach library, Ambisonics, and Wave Field Synthesis. The course includes a 3-hour weekly lecture, 3-hour studio lab, and workshops at IRCAM. This course is taught in collaboration with IRCAM in Paris, one of the world leading institutions in computer music and acoustics

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

This course examines central themes in the emerging field of “Sound Studies”. We explore a range of histories, archeologies and ethnographies of sound and listening, as it intersects with topics in media studies, science and technology studies, political economy and musicology. How has our experience of sound changed as we move from the piano to the personal computer, from the phonoautograph to the mp3? How have political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we are able to listen to, and how we listen to it? Finally, how have performers, physiologists, acousticians, engineers and philosophers worked to understand this radical transformation of the senses?

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

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 connects foreign language pedagogy to speech act theory, politeness theory, and pragmatic variation within the Spanish-speaking world. It is a close study of routinized language behaviors which enables teachers to raise awareness of cultural cues that are necessary to interpret conversations accurately. The course explores innovative, research-based approaches for teaching pragmatics in the foreign language classroom so that learners can avoid cross-cultural misunderstandings and better interpret texts in Spanish.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

This course is an overview of generative and functional analyses of the structure of Spanish, with a focus on grammatical features that are especially challenging to acquire. Particular attention is devoted to exploring syntactic variance in the Spanish-speaking world through the use of authentic Spanish-language materials.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

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

This course examines the history of Special Education in the American public education system, as well as what it means to be a ‘disabled’ student today by examining the vital components that teachers must be aware of when working with students with disabilities. There are 14 generally recognized disability classifications today, each with its’ own unique impact on the educational life of the affected student. This course will look at the current research into multiple intelligences & learning styles, where it becomes evident that using the arts; music, visual arts & dance, can allow access points to many students into the world of learning. Students will explore how collaboration with general education teachers can help inform their pedagogical practice as well as deepen the educational experience of their students. Additionally, the course covers the Individual Education Plan and how to use it as a teaching tool. Students will learn how to partner with the family, community, colleagues & pupils to create a differentiated & welcoming classroom environment. Finally, the course will also examine the ways disability is represented visually in our culture, both through media/popular culture & contemporary art practices.

• Department: Art and Art Professions

An umbrella course that examines global dynamics in culture and media in a broad international and historical context. Special attention is paid to the social, economic, and political theories that inform our understanding of the phenomena and experience of globalization, and its relationship to media and cultural production, distribution and consumption. Specific courses focus on transnational identity formation, political economy of global media, and regional clusters such as the Middle East, Asia, South America, etc.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

This course examines theoretical and methodological challenges in producing cartographies of the global that pay attention to transnational flows, assemblages, circuits and disjunctures across multiple political and social processes. Paying special attention to ethnographic challenges, we will conduct close readings of select global ethnographies of media and communication in order to discuss and decenter the politics of transnational linkages organized around issues of modernity, mobility and locality.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

No description available.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

Provides intensive reviews of common methods of quantitative or qualitative data analysis, and methods of design or measurement used in psychological research. Organized as a series of multisession workshops to provide an overview of the basic assumptions underlying a specific method, strategies for conducting analyses, reading outputs, and interpreting findings. Workshops offered for variable points (0-6); and point values for each workshop will be determined by the Department of Applied Psychology.

• Department: Applied Psychology

This umbrella course examines select topics in critical, cultural, social, and political theory, with special attention to problems of interpretation in the humanities and related social sciences in both historical and theoretical contexts.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication