This course introduces students to the different ways of thinking about music that bind together our Conservatorium culture. It is a course concerned with 'big' questions: What exactly is a musical work? What do we hear when music is played? How do we go about making new music and how do we make old music new again? In grappling with these questions, students learn how to formulate persuasive arguments about the nature of music in general and the significance of musical works and artists in particular. The course is broken into four three-week episodes: Talking about Music, Making Music, Listening to Music and Learning about Music. Lectures from performers, composers, music educators and musicologists comprise each of these episodes and cover the wide variety of music genres and approaches to music making taught at the Conservatorium. As students hone their philosophical positions in relation to the course's 'big' questions, they are therefore simultaneously introduced to the constellation of ideas that constitute our musical world.

Embracing popular music, Indigenous music, classical music, and the music of multicultural communities in Australia, this unit offers an introduction not only to diverse musical traditions, but also to themes prevalent in the work of contemporary music scholars. These include gender and identity, ownership and appropriation, reception and transmission, colonialism and Empire, globalisation, modernity, representation, and music and place.

This unit surveys some of the major developments in the history of western classical music from the Medieval period to the present, and relates them to broader historical and artistic trends. In addition to analysing individual musical works, students will engage with historiography and the relationships between music, society, and the history of ideas.

Music has been dramatically shaped and reshaped by every major change in communications technology in the 20th century from vinyl discs to spotify. In this unit of study we will analyse such issues as the ways in which the early recording industry transformed jazz, the blues and country music, how the presentation of music on radio and television changed the ways the music industry created new musical celebrities, and the challenges the music industry faces as digital technology transforms the creation, distribution and consumption of music.

Through an integrated and research-based approach to music composition and analysis, student's knowledge of music theory and compositional techniques is extended. Skills in this area cover a range of musical styles including classical music (past and present), jazz, popular music and film music. The Written tutorials build on the topics covered in the lectures. The Aural tutorials develop the students ability to listen musically and critically.

An introduction to basic music literacy skills, including learning to read and write music, and an understanding of fundamental aspects of its structure and composition. The material covered in this unit of study concentrates upon the basics of music theory and listening to ensure that participants have a solid grounding for a firm understanding of music notation and organisation.

A more advanced exploration of music literacy skills than MUSC1503. The material covered in this unit of study ranges from the broad to the specific: from an examination of musical elements and the way they are used in a variety of musical genres through to specific compositional aspects such as four-part writing. Analysis and compositional craft regarding melody, harmony and rhythm in classical and contemporary popular music are a central focus of this unit of study. Critical listening skills are developed in this unit of study.

Listening to music performance is an everyday occurrence, yet expert listeners possess tacit knowledge about performers' sound and little is known about how they process sensory information from a performer to conceptualise, recognise and verbalise the sound they hear. This unit of study will focus on recent empirical research studies and examine the ways in which we listen to music performers by sound and sight, how we assess music performance, and how we describe the sounds we hear.

This unit explores major topics in the history of Western art music from the 9th century to c. 1750 in a broad historical context. Beginning with Gregorian chant and the invention of music education notation, we investigate a wide range of genres and styles of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras, as well as innovations including the development of music printing, developments in musical instruments, and the emergence of opera, sonata and concerto. Musical works for analysis and discussion include examples by Hildegard of Bingen, Machaut, Dufay, Josquin, Palestrina, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Corelli, Lully, Purcell, Vivaldi, Handel and J.S. Bach.

This unit will survey the main lines of musical development between 1750 and 1890, with primary focus on the composition of music, and how this relates to the social and aesthetic currents of the time. The overview given in the lecture series will be reinforced by detailed focus on individual works in the tutorials from both historical and analytical perspectives. Topics will include the emergence and codification of classical form and syntax; style and genre in the works of the first Viennese School; Beethoven's 'heroic' and 'late' styles; national opera traditions; symphonic poem and music drama; nationalism and exoticism; and the conflict between progress and tradition.

Traces the essential developments in Western art music from the very end of the 19th century to the start of the 21st, and relates them to broad socio-historical and artistic changes. The overview given in the lectures is reinforced by the analysis of key works in tutorials. Areas covered include Late Romanticism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Free Atonality, Rhythmic Innovation, Neo-classicism, Serial Music, Political Music, American Experimentalism, Electro-Acoustic Music, Chance composition, Textural Composition, Minimalism, influences from Popular Music, Collage and Polystylism, East-West Encounters, Neo-Romanticism, Post Modernism and Spectralism. Works analysed include compositions by Andriessen, Bartok, Cage, Debussy, Ligeti, Messiaen, Part, Schoenberg, Strauss, Stravinsky, Stockhausen and Webern.

Ethnomusicology refers to the study of all musical genres worldwide within their respective social and cultural contexts, and is sometimes also known as the anthropology of music or cultural musicology. This unit introduces and explores some of the most important ideas that have informed the thinking of researchers working in this field - such as the connections between music and gender, social structures, forms of capital, politics, identity, health and the environment. The course also interrogates notions of the nature and experience of music, why musical genres differ and why music has such important but diverse significance worldwide. The course includes several lectures given by expert practitioners from particular musical traditions (such as Indigenous Australian music and Korean drumming), and it directly complements courses on ethnomusicological fieldwork methods. It does not require prior formal musical training.

This unit of study offers an integrated approach to live music performance that includes practical and research components. Students participate in solo and ensemble situations in weekly in-class concerts. Constructive feedback by peers is a significant part of this course and participants trace their own development in weekly reflective journals. Music of all genres (including classical, experimental, popular, jazz and world music), instruments and voice types are accepted, and collaboration across musical traditions is strongly encouraged. A number of seminars dealing with specific key issues are interspersed throughout this unit of study, including performance stress, technical and psychological preparation, ensemble communication and audience perception. Auditions are held during O-Week. This audition consists of two contrasting pieces and a short interview. To be offered an audition, please enroll in this unit of study before O-Week and you will be automatically contacted with all relevant details. If you enroll during or after O-Week, please email the unit coordinator to arrange an alternative audition time.

Ensemble Performance builds on the experience and skills cultivated in Music Performance. Students participate regularly in weekly rehearsal-workshops where ideas are tried out with the participation of peers and the Unit of Study coordinator. Students participate in various ensembles of different sizes, collaborating in a multiplicity of musical genres. This is a highly practical and challenging subject that encourages students to collaborate in a supportive and productive environment. Ensemble Performance culminates with a large-scale public performance in a public venue.

Composition Workshop is designed as an opportunity for students from all musical backgrounds to play, write and perform music together. Each student will write a new piece for an ensemble of classmates that will be performed in an end of semester concert. Set topics studied in this course include: Creative and Resourceful Instrumentation (body percussion, mobile phones as instruments, the human voice and found percussion instruments), Soundscape, Indeterminacy and Loops. The first four weeks of the course are spent exploring these topics through lectures and creative group composition exercises. Students will also look notating their music using one-page scores, graphic notation, time-space notation and text scores. From Week 5 onwards, students will workshop and rehearse their own concert piece for an ensemble of musicians from their class.

This course examines the powerful link between jazz and moments of social revolution in the United States. It illuminates the central role jazz musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Max Roach played in changing hearts, minds and social structures during four distinct historic periods: the Harlem Renaissance, the post-War 1940s, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and the Black Nationalist movement of the 1960s. Its central focus is on how music can both ride and resist the political energies that charge particular historic moments.

This unit of study introduces students to philosophical questions about music and to thinking about music with philosophical methodology. The course visits some of the questions which have perplexed musicians and philosophers alike: How are beauty and music related? What does music tell us about time? What is a musical work? How do we listen? Is music related to language? This course enables all students of music and the liberal arts to understand music as a philosophically distinctive phenomenon.

Psychology of Music examines music cognition and behaviour to explore the way music is created, produced and perceived. This unit will introduce recent interdisciplinary research as a way to explore music as a social activity. It will consider the methods used by sociologists and psychologists to investigate music and encourage students to think conceptually about their own musical activities.

In this unit students aquire skills in how to analyse the forms and functions of songs in diverse cultures and genres. We examine lyrics, music and the different ways they combine; and how the language we speak shapes the way words are put to music. Student learn about the different roles song plays in societies and consider why singing is a universal human activity. Students will gain experience in song analysis and have the opportunity to apply these skills to their own song writing.

This unit is an introduction to the use of digital sound and music in creative and multimedia contexts. It is a practical course in which students are introduced to tools of sound creation and manipulation. Students will undertake creative projects as a means to learning. In addition, participants will be exposed to a number of approaches to electroacoustic music across the 20th and 21st centuries.

How did early American blues and country music develop in tandem? How was punk different in the US, the UK and Australia? What are the origins of the DJ culture? This unit of study presents a thematic overview of a wide variety of styles, movements and spectacles. It examines major genres of popular music, their stylistic features and historical antecedents as well as modes of reception and the role of popular music in everyday life. No formal music training is necessary.

This unit is an introductory survey of the history and aesthetics of film music from the late 1890s to the present day. Topics for discussion will include the dramatic function of music as an element of cinematic narrative, the codification of musical iconography in cinematic genres, the symbolic use of pre-existing music, and the evolving musical styles of film composers.

How did the music of enslaved and marginalised people eventually become a dominant force in contemporary popular culture? This unit will examine the local reinvention of a wide variety of African American music in communities around the world. From soul and funk in West Africa to ska and reggae in the Caribbean, we will examine how music moves around the world and within local communities to make new forms of meaning.

The history of Australian popular music presents us with a long and complex heritage. It reflects, in its very constitution, the lives of those who create it and is underscored by the dynamic relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. This unit of study will explore the continuing experience and influence of a wide range of music made in Australia, from songlines to bush ballads and dance anthems, Countdown and Rage. We will examine hillbilly music of the 1930s, surf rock of the 60s, pub rock of the 70s, reggae, punk and indie rock of the 80s and 90s as well as the emergence of Australian dance music, hip hop and the multiplicity of styles and expressions that mark the contemporary music scene.

This course will survey the history and development of the musical (the combination of song, dialogue, dance and acting onstage) from its antecedents including operetta, singspiel, musical comedy, cabaret and revue to the present day, including Broadway/West End/international, book musicals, epic, through-composed, jukebox and rock influenced, political, didactic, biographical, dance, film and tv. Students will analyze the specific mechanics of the musical (i.e., music, lyrics, book, design, etc.) and the major historical movements from the nineteenth to twenty-first century as contextualized in particular musicals. Students will become familiar with key historical repertoire from 1850 to the present. Students will consider how the musical has interacted with, reflected and influenced social and political culture across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Through an integrated and research-based approach to music composition and analysis, student's knowledge of music theory and compositional techniques is extended. Skills in this area cover a range of musical styles including classical music (past and present), jazz, popular music and film music. The Written tutorials build on the topics covered in the lectures. The Aural tutorials develop the students ability to listen musically and critically.

The culmination of the Fundamentals of Music series, this unit of study is an exploration of musical language used in contemporary popular, film and world music repertoire from ca. 1960 to the present. The focus is on compositional techniques, analytical tools and workflow that relates to contemporary music practitioners. Lectures will examine the given topic for that week with references to examples drawn from a list of repertoire for that topic. These examples will be discussed further in the written tutorials and supported by weekly homework. An important outcome of this unit of study is the final assignment, in which students apply the knowledge accrued over the semester in an original composition, which they also analyse. Aural Tutorials will draw on these topics to develop skills relating to the student's ability to perceive and interpret musical elements and procedures.

This unit of study deals with the different ways in which we comprehend music and with the different ways in which that comprehension might be explained. It deals with modes of hearing and musical analysis for the purpose of leading students towards a deeper knowledge of how music in various genres (ranging from the classical mainstream to the twentieth-century avant-garde, from Tin Pan Alley songs to punk rock and hip-hop) is understood. This is a required unit of study for a music major in an Arts degree.

Students will learn about, discuss and play different musical forms from East Asia - ranging from ancient guqin music to contemporary K-Pop. They will develop an understanding of key aesthetic concepts, musical instruments and musical features of the music cultures in this region. Students will be encouraged to develop awareness of the diversity of East Asian musics and cultures, and of music's interrelation with and great significance to East Asian societies both in the past and today.

More than 250 years after his death, J.S. Bach remains one of the most revered musicians in the Western tradition. What influences formed Bach's style? What makes his music embedded in its time and place, yet distinctive and instantly recognisable? This unit investigates the music of this iconic composer in its historical context, considering his training, cultural and religious environment, stylistic influences and ongoing legacy, and allows students to explore their own research interests relating to Bach's music.

This unit will explore the fantastic as a central aspect of romanticism in its various manifestations, including the uncanny, the daemonic and the alienated. In music, this meshes fruitfully with the fantasy as a genre, which is similarly dependent on the imagination and the evasion of clear boundaries. A range of Lieder, operas, symphonic and solo works by composers such as Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn and Schubert will be studied against the backdrop of literary and artistic innovations by Goethe, Hoffmann, Byron, and Friedrich. Theories of the fantastic by Todorov, Freud and others will also be examined.

The New German School was a controversial term coined in 1859 to legitimise the self-consciously progressive art of figures such as Wagner and Liszt. This course explores the music and aesthetic theories of these two composers against the backdrop of contemporary debates and reception politics. Their personal relationship will also be scrutinized in detail. Works to be studied include selections from Liszt's symphonic poems and piano works, Wagner's Tristan, Die Meistersinger and Ring tetralogy.

Since the early 20th century, the period c.1750-1830 has been associated with the idea of Classicism in European music, but it was also a period of rapid development and transformation in both music and society. This unit offers an in-depth examination of the music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and their contemporaries in this historical context, and provides an opportunity to explore topics that will deepen and extend students' understanding of this highly significant period. Students will explore important repertoire, become acquainted with scholarly and performance issues associated with the style by studying a selection of critical writings about the period, and choose one topic to research in depth.

Between 1889 and 1914, certain Austro-Germanic composers played a crucial role in the emerging modernist movement. Richard Strauss, Mahler and Schoenberg engaged with past musical traditions and contemporary trends in visual art, literature and philosophy to produce a distinctively new type of music. Works to be studied include Strauss's tone poems, Mahler's symphonies and Schoenberg's chamber music, as well as Lieder and stage works. Among the issues which will be explored are the way in which traditional formal structures were invoked and destabilised, the changes the musical language underwent and how music was conceptualized in this era of change and crisis.

This unit is an advanced exploration of digital sound and music in creative and multimedia contexts. It is a subject in which students are expected to make sophisticated use of sound creation and manipulation tools in pursuit of their own musical ideas. Students will undertake creative projects as a means to learning. An ability to read music at a basic level and an understanding of fundamental musical terminology is an advantage in this unit of study.

What do we study when we study music? What kinds of stories do we tell about the history of music? What are the central issues, questions, and concerns that drive the study of music? This unit of study begins to answer these questions and provides an overview of musicology as an academic discipline. The readings cover the field of musicology from its beginnings in the 1880s up to the present day.

Every musical form worldwide exists within a tradition, and globalization has been crucial in shaping those traditions in the contemporary era. This course explores different ways that musical traditions and globalization intersect. It introduces key theoretical approaches to both globalization (including postcolonial perspectives) and the concept of musical tradition, and explores case studies including social media and music in the Pacific Islands, East African hip-hop, understanding globalization's influence on indigenous Australian musical traditions and historically informed Western art music performance.

What can we learn from non-textual approaches to understanding music? The primary goal of this unit of study is to study music not as a composer, producer, performer, listener or audience member, but as an ethnographer. That is, analysing music through an observational, experiential and intellectual understanding of how people make and take meaning from music.

The range of media channels through which we experience, popular music has prolifereated in recent years. The emotive power of music is used to tell stories, sell products and connect people to one another. This unit will analyse the use of popular music in a broad range of multimedia forms from film and television to video games and the use of digital media to disseminate a multitude of musical multimedia productions.

The act of performing music creates a multitude of social relationships between listeners, audiences, musicians, performers, and the industries and institutions that surround them. This subject will ask students to study acts of performance historically, theoretically, and observationally. They will examine a wide range of situations and circumstances and try to work out how the expression of music is also an expression, affirmation, and contestation of social power. This subject will appeal to those who wish to study subjects such as music, performance studies, sociology, anthropology, and gender and cultural studies. It cuts across all of these areas of inquiry in the attention that is paid to the complexity and subtlety of how music is perceived and experienced across multiple social scenes and communities. This subject is not about performance practice or assessment. Instead, it seeks to allow students to gain some insight into the experience of performance as multifaceted and perspectival.

Even as the 'Age of Newspapers' seems to be coming to an end, human beings' need for authoritative commentary on music remains as strong as ever. Along with surveying the history of music journalism from the early eighteenth century up to the present day, this unit of study offers participants the chance to try their hands at various forms of music journalism.

Latin American music has become a powerful force in today's music industry, but its rich diversity and cultural contexts are not always known or acknowledged. This unique unit of study surveys a number of Latin American popular, folk and indigenous musical traditions in terms of their cultural milieu and historical development. These include Afro-Cuban traditions, samba, salsa, tango and Andean music. Various musical, historical and cultural concerns are examined alongside a practical and creative involvement with the compositional characteristics and the repertoire pertinent to these traditions.

Climate change is one of the most important global issues of our era, and one which is destined to have a major influence on the lives of subsequent generations. It is especially dependent upon our understandings of the environment, our place within it, and our views of our environmental responsibilities. In this unit, students will explore some of the incredible range of ways in which music, the environment and climate change and interwoven. They will be guided through lectures from musicians and researchers involved in the connection between music and the environment across the fields of ethnomusicology, composition, digital music technology, jazz and contemporary music, as well as by lectures and a workshop with Indigenous Australian cultural custodians. Through this unit, students will understand not only the ways that, for millennia, music has a central role in the way that humans record, transmit and promote understandings of many different aspects of the environment, but also how it functions today and how it may help in solving environmental problems of the future.

This unit of study deals with the different ways in which we comprehend music and with the different ways in which that comprehension might be explained. It deals with modes of hearing and musical analysis for the purpose of leading students towards a deeper knowledge of how music in various genres (ranging from the classical mainstream to the twentieth-century avant-garde, from Tin Pan Alley songs to punk rock and hip-hop) is understood. This is a required unit of study for a music major in an Arts degree.

This interdisciplinary unit provides students with the opportunity to address complex problems identified by industry, community, and government organisations, and gain valuable experience in working across disciplinary boundaries. In collaboration with a major industry partner and an academic lead, students integrate their academic skills and knowledge by working in teams with students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. This experience allows students to research, analyse and present solutions to a realworld problem, and to build on their interpersonal and transferable skills by engaging with and learning from industry experts and presenting their ideas and solutions to the industry partner.