Words for Music

This course will investigate the nature of writing
words for music and setting pre-existing words to
musicj. Students will develop an understanding of
how musical time affects the perception of words
and how words interact with the perception of
musical ideas. Collaboration will be important and
the course is open both to composers and to
writers as well. Writers will be paired with
different composers, and in addition to writing
their own texts will be required to write analyses
of historical and contemporary musical lyrics.
Composers will also be asked to write a
significant amount of text to be set to music and
will additionally be asked to set music to their
own texts and to the texts of their assigned
writing partners. A broad range of musical and
verbal styles will be explored, both popular and
historical, and writing for the musical stage will
be explored in depth as well. Prerequisite for
music students is MTHY-112; prerequisite for
non-music students is permission of instructor.