Spring 2026 Course Search

This is a course for composers who have taken composition courses previously and have good notation skills.  Enrollment is limited to 10 students. Each student will produce a sizable piece for String Quartet. The class time will be used for analysis and study of works composed for string quartet and for examination of the student’s works-in-progress.

Accessibility describes the practice of freeing a space or an event so it might be visited by more people in more ways than one could ever presume at the outset. In this course, we will explore the litany of practices that allow more people (and in particular, disabled, mad, and chronically ill people) into all spheres of public life with a particular focus on performance events.

Catastrophic events—droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and landslides—are growing in frequency and intensity around the world. As more of the global population concentrates in urban areas, the nature and consequences of these natural hazards are taking on a distinct and often violent shape in today’s metropolises and megacities. This course investigates how urban life reshapes both the impact of disasters and our capacity to respond to them.

This ensemble-based course explores the intersection of live performance, experimental soundscapes, and dub aesthetics. Rooted in the traditions of dub music—including remix culture, delay and reverb manipulation, and bass-driven textures—students will create immersive sonic environments using a mix of acoustic instruments, electronic tools, field recordings, and live effects processing.

The Tuning in the Trees is an advanced seminar in microtonality that treats tuning systems as both technical structures and living landscapes. Students will explore how musical intervals emerge from natural patterns—such as tree bifurcations, harmonic ratios, and number sequences—while engaging deeply with Just intonation, Meantone, Bohlen–Pierce, and other non-Western tunings.

In this course we will be taking a hands on approach to understanding the lever harp both historically and compositionally. We will be building and stringing small 19 string harps which will be used as the basis for our compositional work where students will be creating new works of varying length for the lever harp to be presented at the end of the semester. We’ll look at what techniques are and are not achievable, what makes this instrument unique to other harps, and how to include it in larger compositional contexts.

In 1948, Elanor Roosevelt, instrumental for the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, said “In a true sense, human rights are a fundamental object of law and government in a just society. Human rights exist to the degree that they are respected by people in relations with each other and by governments in relations with their citizens.”

With billions of images uploaded to the internet daily, we are bombarded by media content on corporately owned platforms from news outlets to algorithmic social media feeds and YouTube videos. How do we create meaningful independent media for each other in this current age of disinformation? What importance do physical materials such as books, zines, posters, and pamphlets still have in disseminating information and ideas to our communities? How does the art of self-publishing become a means of empowerment and an act of care?

Journalism & Democracy is the result of a grant and partnership with the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, a national network of student journalism programs around the United States. The course recognizes the essential role that the arts and culture play in a healthy democracy. Arts and culture invite us to experience perspectives and ways of life different from our own; they shape conversations about freedom, equal rights and other values that are at the core of American society; and they help us engage with the world in new and important ways.

This class will examine interesting thinkers about our future.  Artists, anthropologists, afro futurists, writers, scientists and philosophers have all thought about what we are facing in our futures. Books and essays such as “The Fourth Turning” by Neil Howe, “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber, “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama,  "Emergent Strategies" by Adrienne Maree Brown, “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit, “The Work After Our Rage” by Kenneth Bailey and Lori Lobenstine”, "DeltasUNite and the UNCCRD" and others.

In this course, students will document the lived experiences of individuals during this immensely challenging period in American history. Students will receive training in the methods of oral history, interviewing techniques, historical ethics, and archival work. They will conduct interviews of classmates and community members. These narratives will then be preserved in order to provide future generations with a firsthand account of the United States during this period of history.