Courses Offered in Spring 2026 (114AY 2S)

This graduate course introduces research methods, as well as the strategies and the “language” of writing about music to performance majors. We start with a brief review of the basics of research venues, tools, and crucial issues in and ethics of academic writing. We continue with a series of sample writings hand in hand with these principles. We will see how the authors focus on different aspects of perspectives in their discussion of music and how they develop and sharpen their arguments.

The aim of this course is to offer graduate music majors necessary tools and directions to engage in an intelligent discussion of their repertory, skills that they may apply to their term projects, thesis writing, and lecture recitals. We will have two invited music scholars coming to discuss the ways that they phrase they theories arguments. The selected sample writings will enable us to see the variety of ways that an author may use to approach a music work.