Spring 2026 Course Search

Celtic history and music from Ireland, Scotland, Bretagne, Galatia, and Cape Breton will be experienced, studied, and performed using instruments and voices. We’ll find and cross the musical bridges between regions–from the ballads of Ireland, Scotland and Wales to the Alalas of Spain, through the Scottish Gaelic speaking Highland and Islands to the dance tunes of Brittany. An end-of-term presentation will be prepared drawing on inspiration from traditional forms.

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American icon whose approach and innovation on the trumpet set him apart from the mainstream. Davis explored new approaches to creating and composing music. Davis was a trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. When you hear a Miles Davis recording, you know it's Miles. Davis's five-decade career kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.

Learning to draw is as much about learning how to use your hand as it is about learning how to see. The focus of this course is on learning to draw from observation and developing close looking skills. Drawing from observation fundamentally alters our day-to-day experience by heightening our attention to details and the specificity of our surroundings. In this course, you will work with various materials, including ink, compressed and vine charcoal, graphite, and/or collage to represent a range of subjects.

When you first learn how to paint, the focus is typically on gaining facility with the application and manipulation of paint to articulate the subject. In this intermediate course, we shift our attention to the often overlooked step that precedes painting: preparing the surface. 

In this course we focus our attention on a few of the most exciting composers of the late twentieth-century, and discuss how their music has influenced the music of the current period.

This seminar course investigates the cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions of sound through critical readings, listening exercises, and discussions. Drawing from fields such as sound studies, media theory, musicology, literature, and art, Readings in Sound challenges students to consider how sound shapes experience, knowledge, identity, and space.

This course is for experienced student artists with a firm commitment to serious work in the studio. Students will work primarily on self-directed projects in an effort to refine individual concerns and subject matter. Students will present work regularly for critique in class as well as for individual studio meetings with the instructor. Development of a strong work ethic will be crucial.

Fake news, reality television, “IRL” – asserting the veracity of our perceptions is a constant preoccupation in contemporary culture. What is real? Realism is a widely used term with multiple connotations: verisimilitude, authenticity, objectivity, truth, fact.

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.

This course is a hands-on color laboratory where students will explore the tactile, material, and physical characteristics of pigments. Working with both earth and synthetic colors, we’ll grind, mix, and transform pure pigments into drawing materials including watercolor paints and chalk pastels. If time allows, we will also make inks. Outside of class, students will complete a short research project/presentation, and create a self-directed body of drawings using the materials created in class.

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.