Spring 2026 Course Search

A song feedback collective, focused on how musical restrictions can spur us to growth. Over the course of the term, students will write five songs (or revise a single song in radical ways) based on the critique and decisions of the group. We’ll discuss how to form supportive but insightful critique while challenging each other to go new places. What does it take to create a song based on someone else’s text, completely a cappella, or without a single chord? How do you welcome in new materials and collaborators, from across genre and style?

This class is an extension of the Black Music Division at Bennington College that brought dancers and musicians together for live performance in the composition of Improvisation. It is co-taught by Susan Sgorbati and Michael Wimberly. 

Musicians and Dancers will study and practice together a Solo Practice and an Ensemble Practice, building compositional structures for performance. 

This spring semester course, taught each year by different members of the Music faculty, serves as a workshop and forum for seniors to develop, present, and receive feedback on their advanced work in Music. Senior projects may take many forms, reflecting the breadth of creative practice in Music; performances, installations, musical plays, recordings, research projects, publications, or interdisciplinary collaborations are all viable options.

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.

Vandercook Proofing Presses were once a vital aspect of the printing industry and have been adopted widely by artists for letterpress printing and book arts. Bennington College is fortunate to possess three Vandercooks, housed in the Word and Image Lab.

This course explores the art and science of mixing and producing audio for both emergent immersive formats and traditional legacy platforms. Students will gain hands-on experience with spatial audio technologies such as Dolby Atmos, Ambisonics, and binaural mixing, while also mastering industry-standard techniques for stereo and 5.1 surround sound production.

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.

Music reflects the powerful journey of the people This course will study Music of the Struggle for Freedom, Rebellion and Civil and Social Rights, beginning with the African American journey in the United States from late 1700s to present day, and expanding to other cultures throughout the world.

This course is an introduction to the magic of copper plate Intaglio. We will explore various techniques to prepare our plates including hand working and acid etching with materials such as rosin resists and sugar lifts. By the end of term, we will be printing in color. Ultimately, the overall goal of our endeavors will be to begin a dialog about artistic production in a contemporary context while also exploring the unique history of the intaglio process.