Spring 2026 Course Search

Balkan music is fierce brass, complex harmonies, and mind-bending asymmetrical dances. It is spirited Macedonian wedding music, dissonant village songs, devastating Bosnian love ballads, Greek polyphonic songs, and heart-pounding Turkish rhythms. In the Bennington Balkan Ensemble, we will learn to perform a variety of traditional, urban, village, and popular music from Southeast Europe. Singing and playing indigenous, orchestral, and electronic instruments, we’ll explore repertoire from Albania, Greece, Bosnia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosova, Turkey, Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia.

Part of the Chemistry 1-4 suite, this will examine the energetics of chemical changes. Focusing on the enthalpic and entropic contributions to free energy change, we will examine how energy or work can be extracted from chemical systems and how these systems behave as they tend toward equilibrium. Types of equilibria to be covered will include acid/base, solubility, phase change, metal-ligand interactions and oxidation/reduction. The energetics of electron transfer reactions will be examined along with the practical considerations of making use of such reactions to power electric devices.