Morgan's Fall 2007 Schedule

Morgan's schedule for the current semester at Sarah Lawrence is shown below. She is a two-thirds music student. So instead of taking two other classes besides the music program, She is taking double music plus one other class (a Buddhist history class taught by her don).

MUSC 3602 Studies in Music and Culture
MUSC 4499 Music Program
MUSC 5012 Jazz Piano
MUSC 5020 Voice
MUSC 5126 Advanced Jazz Theory II
MUSC 5145 Basic Aural Skills
MUSC 5312 Jazz Composition and Arranging
MUSC 5313 Jazz Colloquium
MUSC 5315 Jazz Vocal Ensemble
MUSC 5350 Gamelan Angklung Chandra Buana
RLGN 2094 The Buddhist Tradition

Descriptions for a couple of the classes include:

MUSC 3602 Studies in Music and Culture

This yearlong course provides students with an introduction to ethnomusicology, the study of the interactive relationship between musical and cultural practices. Selected case studies will introduce students to world musical styles through specific communities’ aesthetic-theoretical models and social histories, as well as considering the contemporary implications of music as it is imbricated in (and constitutive of) intercultural exchange. The first semester will cover many canonical sites of ethnomusicological analysis, including the Native Americas, Africa, Indonesia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Through close readings of classic ethnographies, we will examine how different ethnomusicological methods have been employed to analyze these traditions and how those interpretive strategies are relevant to us today. The second semester will focus on several different traditional and contemporary African musical practices, as well documenting historical movements and modern developments throughout the black Atlantic diaspora, including North America, the Caribbean, and South America. We will not stop at considering contemporary and traditional arts as mere reflections of local culture, but instead learn how music actually produces culture; we will explore how musical performance and listening construct social relationships through their vital roles in everyday life.

MUSC 5350 Gamelan Angklung Chandra Buana

The gamelan is an “orchestra” that includes four-toned metallophones, gongs, drums, and flutes. This gamelan angklung was specially handcrafted in Bali for the College and was named Chandra Bawana, or “Moon Earth,” at its dedication on April 16, 2000, in Reisinger Concert Hall at Sarah Lawrence.

RLGN 2094 The Buddhist Tradition

An in-depth exposure to the religious tradition known in the West as “Buddhism,” in all of its incredible historical and cultural diversity. In the first semester, the course focuses on the evolution of Buddhist doctrines, practices, and institutions in India, from the origins of the religion as a group of “world-renouncing” ascetics through the development of large state-supported monastic communities and the emergence of the major reform movements known as Mahayana and Tantra. It also treats the Buddhism of two regions of the world—Southeast Asia and the Tibetan plateau—where the respective traditions have been most self-consciously concerned with maintaining precedents inherited from India. The second semester of the course focuses on the Buddhism of East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan), where new branches of the tradition such as Zen and Pure Land developed and flourished. It also deals with the issues of Buddhism in the modern world and the contemporary spread of various branches of the tradition from Asia to the West.