Autumn 2025
Music Education | Music Theory | Musicology
Visit BuckeyeLink for the most up-to-date course information in Class Search (SIS).
Music Education
MUSIC 7838 — Music Psychology
3 credits
TH 4:10–6:45 p.m.
Instructor: Eugenia Costa-Giomi
Overview of the field known as psychology of music. The leading questions of the course center on the perception and cognition of music and how our minds and bodies construct, experience, and respond to music. We will discuss the psychoacoustical basis of sound, the differences between sound communicative systems including music and language, the evolutionary function of music, the effects of music engagement on behavior, the development of music skills throughout the lifespan, the process of music enculturation, and the interpretation and creation of musical structure and meaning in the contexts of listening, learning, composing, and performing.
Music Theory
MUSIC 7829.05 — Special Topics in Music Theory: "Musical Topic Theory"
W–F 2:20–3:40 p.m.
Instructor: David Heinsen
This seminar is centered on the study and analytical application of topics, i.e., musical signs that reference genres, styles, and types borrowed from different contexts. In this course, we will examine foundational texts of the field in addition to more recent literature that interfaces topic theory with other theoretical approaches (performance practice, cognition, schema, narrative, corpus studies, etc.), thinking critically about the arguments and issues under discussion. We will also apply these approaches to a wide variety of repertoire (including concert, popular, film, and video game musics), and learn how to identify topics, understand the meanings that they bring to a musical work, and develop aesthetically warranted interpretations.
MUSIC 5622 — Theory and Analysis: 19th Century
Graduate section (36937)
W–F 4:10–5:05 p.m.
Instructor: David Heinsen
This upper-level course focuses on the analysis of instrumental and vocal music of the Western European tradition from the 19th century. Students will engage with representative works through their formal, harmonic, rhythmic, and voice-leading design, while thinking critically about the implications of a work's structure on its potential meanings. Course readings will introduce students to theoretical concepts in semiotics, hermeneutics, musical narrative, and text-music relations. In-class activities and assignments will have students apply these concepts through analysis and interpretation—with the ultimate goal of understanding a 19th-century musical work through both structural and semantic lenses.
MUSIC 5801 — Analysis of Video Game Music
Graduate section (39635)
Tu–Th 3:55–5:15 p.m.
Instructor: Jeremy Smith
This course focuses on the theory and analysis of video game music, focusing on topics such as functions of game audio, interactivity and immersion, game history and technology, comparisons between game music and film music, musical meaning and tropes, genres and styles, as well as fandom, song covers, and nostalgia. Each week students will read articles or book chapters and analyze some video game music in relation to the weekly topic. We will engage directly with video game music through close listening, watching others play games, and playing games ourselves.
Musicology
MUSIC 6672 — Introduction to Ethnomusicology
Seven-week course — Session I
3 credits
Tu–Th: 2:20–3:40 p.m.
Instructor: Katie Graber
This course is a historical introduction to the ways scholars have studied “world music.” Beginning with Comparative Musicology in the late 19th century, the course moves through successive periods of Ethnomusicological disciplinary orientations and cross-disciplinary affiliations to the present; and, more globally, from the colonialist foundations of (ethno)musicology to the recent decolonial critiques of the discipline(s). The course aims to give students a broad overview of the methods, theories, topics, people, and places that have defined “Ethnomusicology” over (roughly) the past 150 years.
MUSIC 8886 — Theories and Methods
Seven-week course — Session II
3 credits
Tu–Th: 2:20–3:40 p.m.
Instructor: Katie Graber
This course is an intensive and immersive seminar on current trends, directions, ideas, and orientations in ethnomusicology. In this class, students will read, reflect on, and discuss a series of recent monographs in the discipline, books which challenge, reimagine, and seek to further develop (or critique) what it means to do a variety of musical traditions around the world today.
MUSIC 8950 — Historical Methods for Studying the Performing Arts
3 credit hours
M 12:55–3:40 p.m.
Instructor: Danielle Fosler-Lussier
This course takes a hands-on approach to accessing and interpreting performing arts of the past. We will use a variety of primary sources, including written and audio sources from archives, newspapers and other media. We will become familiar with old and new methods historians now use for analyzing and showcasing their data, including digital humanities strategies and tools. We will examine and practice writing for public and scholarly audiences. By the end of this course students will be able to plan a historical research project; find relevant source material; and use that source material to build a convincing historical argument that serves readers well.
MUSIC 6895 — Colloquium in Musicology
M 3:55–5:45 p.m.
Instructor: Katie Graber
Musicology Student Colloquium is a repeatable 2-credit course for graduate students to develop musicological research, writing, and pedagogy. This workshop is based around the Ohio State Lectures in Musicology series and other topics of interest to participants. In conversation with the instructor, students will define their own pedagogy or writing projects, such as teaching statements, syllabus development, grant proposals, conference presentations, or articles. Students will engage in peer review and discussion about recent theories, methods and writing styles in music scholarship and teaching.
MUSIC 8850 — Performance Practice
Tu–Th: 12:45–2:05 p.m.
Instructor: Graeme Boone
Music 8850 is a graduate-level course, intended for master's or doctoral students who have an interest in historically-informed performance practice. Following the emphases of performance education in the School of Music, the course is oriented to classical-music repertories in the Western historical tradition, though we explore other areas of music (including music theater, popular music, folk and ethnic music, world music) depending on student interests and on our available time. It tends to privilege the lesser known, earlier historical eras (Antiquity to the 19th century), rather than the most recent ones (20-21st centuries) though students are free to pursue research in their areas of interest.
The course experience is grounded in reading, discussion, research, and presentation. Students are expected to study the assigned readings, culled mostly from two textbooks, but also from monographs, journal articles, historical treatises, and other sources, and they should be prepared to discuss them in class. In addition, students are each assigned a few focused topics for presentation, which require research and thoughtful organization; these include one presentation on a historical treatise and one on a historical instrument, vocal practice, or other topic of the student's choice. Finally, while there will be no tests in the course, students are expected to write a research paper of at least 15 pages’ length, based on a serious investigation into some concrete aspect of historical performance practice. Due at the end of term, this paper should display a firm grasp of the topic, including the relevant modern and historical bibliography. It is understood that students will have variable or limited knowledge of foreign languages, which affects research, bibliography, and scholarship; and that online access to research sources is not always possible. As instructor, I am there to help with these as other course-related issues.
MUSIC 7780.20 — African Performing Ensemble
T: 5:30–6:50 p.m.
1 credit
Prereq: Admission by audition, or permission of instructor.
Repeatable to a maximum of 12 credit hours or 12 completions.
Instructor: Jason Buchea, PhD candidate
Ensemble dedicated to performing African-derived music.
SPA/MUS 7780.22 — Andean Music Ensemble
W: 5:30–7:35 p.m.
1 credit
Instructor: Michelle Wibbelsman, Spanish and Portuguese
This course embraces Andean traditions of participatory music making to learn how to perform music from Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina; sing in Spanish, Quechua, Kichwa and Aymara; explore Andean musical and performance aesthetics; and learn about the cultural background and social significance of the songs. We experience instruments like zampoñas or sikuris (Andean panpipes), tarkas (Bolivian festival flutes), quenas/kenas (notched mouthpiece flutes), charangos (Andean string instruments), guitars, bombo (Andean bass drum), chakchas (goat hooves rattles), cajón peruano and quijada (Afro-Peruvian percussion). There are no auditions and no requirements for prior musical experience or language proficiency.
ARTSSCI 6000 — Career Exploration for Graduate Students
1 credit
First seven-week session: Tu 9:10-10:55 a.m.
Second seven-week session: M 9:10-10:55 a.m.
Instructor: Danielle Fosler-Lussier
18th Ave. Library, room 270
This course introduces strategies for discovering a variety of career paths; assessing how a job might fit one’s interests, skills, and values; cultivating networks; and entering a profession. The course is suitable for graduate students at any stage, with any career goal. Weekly assignments required, graded S/U.
Spring 2025
Music Education | Music Theory | Musicology | Music studies outside the School of Music
Visit BuckeyeLink for the most up-to-date course information in Class Search (SIS).
Music Education
Music 7760 — Basic Concepts in Music Education
T 4:10–7 p.m. | Timashev N510
3 credits — David Hedgecoth
The principles of music education and of the educational and cultural objectives derived from related disciplines which give direction and purpose to the music education program. Topics include historical foundations of music education; philosophy and advocacy for music education; curriculum development and design; issues of social justice and democracy in music education; and culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and other similar epistemological and pedagogical frameworks. Prereq: 4586 (586) or 4587 (587), or equivalent. Not open to students with credit for 760.
Music Theory
Music 5621 — Theory and Analysis of the 17th–18th Century (Graduate section 34979)
TR 4:10–5:05 p.m.
Instructor: Matthew Bilik
Analysis of representative works from the 17th–18th century, introducing relevant theoretical concepts.
Music 7829.05 — Analysis of Timbre
TR 2:20–3:40 p.m.
Instructor: Sasha Drozzina
Timbre has become increasingly important as an organizing and expressive principle of musical works but can prove to be difficult to define. The seminar confronts the challenges of defining and conceptualizing timbre through an overview of scholarship on the theory and analysis of timbre. The course bibliography includes music theory, musicology, music cognition, and sound studies. Students will learn and apply strategies for analyzing timbre in various genres (such as classical, pop, and more). Coursework includes weekly readings, listening and analysis, short written assignments, in- class presentations (individual and group), and a final analytical paper. The ultimately goal in this seminar will be to embrace the concept of timbre in all its complex parameters.
Music 8818 — Theories of Heinrich Schenker/Linear Analysis
MWF 4:10–5:05 p.m.
Instructor: Matthew Bilik
This course investigates tonal music from the Baroque through the twentieth century (1750–1950) through the lens of linear analysis, a type of analytical technique made famous by Heinrich Schenker. Students will absorb and demonstrate the principles of linear analysis, such as long-range formal and tonal structure, through daily analysis of works as well as classroom discussions and presentations. By the end of the semester, students will be able to illuminate — through harmonic/melodic reduction, etc. — the different levels of structure that a composer creates. Thinking about music in this manner offers windows into the composition process itself and ideas for more effective performances.
Music 8840 — Music, Movement, Image
MW 2:20–3:40 p.m.
Instructor: Anna Gawboy
This graduate course explores a range of strategies for the analysis of historic and contemporary audiovisual compositions. It examines how musical attributes such as temporality, rhythmicity, textural differentiation, development, repetition, hierarchy, and large-scale form are transferred to the visual domain and surveys the spectrum of relationships that can be established between the musicalized moving image and sounding music. Discussions will address considerations of genre, artistic production, performance, metaphor, and cognitive perception. Students are encouraged to adopt a broad view of possible applications, which could include visual music, dance and other forms of embodied musical gesture, performance painting, audiovisual installations, pop concert lighting, musical fountains, musical animations, and/or musical fireworks displays.
Musicology
Music 5651 — Opera History
TR 12:40–1:35 p.m.
2 credits — Katie Graber
This course will focus on the cultural context and reception of opera in the European tradition, mainly in U.S. performance contexts (though students will be supported in learning about other contexts if they desire). We will pay particular attention to the representation of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality on and around the operatic stage, with weekly topics such as musical exoticism, perceptions of opera as high/low art, and composer diversity. Weekly assignments will include watching and researching operas and reading scholarly articles, and final projects will be a choice of a research paper or assessments of a number of new operas.
Music 6895 — Ohio State Musicology Student Colloquium
Seminar Section 020 (37675)
2 credit hours, S/U grading
M 3:55–5:45 p.m.
18th Ave. Library, Room 205
Instructor: Katie Graber
Musicology Student Colloquium is a repeatable 2-credit course for graduate students to develop musicological research, writing, and pedagogy. This workshop is based around the Ohio State Lectures in Musicology series and other topics of interest to participants. In conversation with the instructor, students will define their own pedagogy or writing projects, such as teaching statements, syllabus development, grant proposals, conference presentations, or articles. Students will engage in peer review and discussion about recent theories, methods and writing styles in music scholarship and teaching.
Music 7742 — Identity Development in 19th- and 20th-Century Music
Class no. 37018
MWF 12:40–1:35 p.m.
Timashev N310
Instructor: Arved Ashby
This is a survey of music pieces and aesthetics from about 1800 to the early 2000s: instances of creation, practice, and theory that demonstrate developing Euro-American concepts of musical identity. (We won't concentrate on the specific identities themselves, the actual demographics, but rather on some important ways that music and musicking have modelled identity and identity-expression.) Such a survey has to begin with literary influences on musicians. There originated in Europe ca. 1800 an impactful style of musically embodied subjectivity and self-understanding, as influenced in large part by early Romantic literature: for instance in the literary-musical cults of individual heroism, self-actualization, and “sensibility” that are still current today. These self-reflexive paradigms influenced theme-based composition and extramusical representation in Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and others.
Moving into the 20th century, these developing dualities of self-vs-other drove modernist musicians (Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg, Boulez, Ruth Crawford) to certain ideas of objectivity and universality, and nationalist and American populist musicians (Ives, Beach, Gershwin, Copland, Bernstein) to notions of local subjectivity. Later paradigms that we'll examine in musical-conceptual terms are post-nationalism, post-colonialism, feminism, globalism, and African-American separatism (the Black Panther Party demanding in 1966 an educational system cultivating "a knowledge of self" in order to allow "[the] chance to relate to anything else"). Following these last currents in the later 20th and early 21st centuries, we will focus on music by Pauline Oliveros, Nina Simone, Steve Reich, Prince, Silvestre Revueltas, Tania León, Keith Jarrett, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Music 8950 — Seminar in Musicology: The Grateful Dead in Music, Myth and History
Class no. 30742
WF 3:55–5:15 p.m.
18th Ave. Library, room 205
3 credits — Graeme M. Boone
In this seminar we shall study the Grateful Dead as musical, cultural, and historical icons of the later 20th century. Our goal is to explore the formation and evolution of the band and its music, the contexts informing its career and reception, and its relationship to the development of jam-band culture since the 1980s. As a student in the course, you will be expected to participate in class based on assigned readings and listenings, as well as your own musical experiences; you will also give occasional presentations, and develop independent research on a topic of your own interest, in view of a substantial final paper.
Music studies courses outside the School of Music
ARTSSCI 6000 — Career Exploration for Graduate Students
Spring 2025 (First seven-week session)
R 9:10–10:55 a.m.
18th Ave. Library, room 270
Instructor: Danielle Fosler-Lussier
This one-credit course introduces strategies for discovering a variety of career paths; assessing how a job might fit one’s interests, skills, and values; cultivating networks; and entering a profession. The course is suitable for graduate students at any stage, with any career goal. Weekly assignments required, graded S/U.
COMPSTD 8200 — Interdisciplinary Learning Lab 2
Class No: 284067
R 2:15–5 p.m.
Hagerty Hall 451
Instructors: Ryan Skinner (skinner.176) and Barry Shank (shank.46@osu.edu)
The Comparative Studies Interdisciplinary Learning Laboratories are two-part courses that seek to give participants opportunities to engage in sustained interdisciplinary research, to workshop their research projects in conversation with one another, and to share their projects with broader publics. This year’s seminar provides an opportunity for students to work together to design and produce musical performances that engage audiences both on and off campus. Goals of these performances include testing principles that have been examined in CS 8100 for their real-world applicability and providing innovative performance opportunities for musicians (amateur and professional).
NOTE: Having taken Autumn 2024's COMPSTD 8100 is not a prerequisite for enrollment in Spring 2025's COMPSTD 8200.
KOREAN 5455 — Interdisciplinary Courses in Korean Art, Music, Film, and Theatre
MW 2:20–3:40 p.m.
Instructor: TBA
Interdisciplinary course in the history and criticism of Korean art, music, theatre, martial art, healing art and film with reference to their implications to humanity.
CHINESE 5474 — Chinese Opera
M 2:15–5 p.m.
Instructor: Marjorie K. M. Chan
Introduction to Chinese opera as traditional culture, dramatic literature, and performing art; selected opera scripts and stage performances from Beijing opera, Kunqu, and regional operas; illustrated discussions of various aspects of the theater.