THTREMUS 385: Performing Arts Management

In this asynchronous online course, students will explore the key components of operating a nonprofit performing arts organization. Students will engage in evaluating real-world situations, and learn from guests in leadership positions in each module. Guests include a Broadway Producer, a board liaison from the Kennedy Center, the operations coordinator for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Director of Development for Beth Morrison Project, and the Director of Marketing from Ballet Hispánico. Students will use the cases, course guest Q&As, and a book to inform the initial plans for a theoretical performing arts organization that they design in small pieces across the 6 weeks. Much of the course delivery is through video, with the option to link to Spotify and treat those components of the course like a podcast.

THTREMUS 101: Intro to Acting

This is a highly participatory, skills-based studio course designed for students early in their acting education and/or students with curiosity and a sense of adventure. We will concentrate on the actor’s basic tools—voice, body, creativity, awareness, empathy, play, and critical analysis. Through active engagement with text, performance, and observation we will also seek parallels to our lives and our daily “performances” of self. We will explore these topics through a wide range of activities, including theatre games, improvisation, creative writing exercises, storytelling, readings, and performances of short scenes. This course challenges us to actively explore how exercises in acting engage our creative mind, body and spirit.

THTREMUS 211: Introduction to Theatre & Drama

This course introduces students to as many basic elements of the theatre, practical and theoretical, as time allows. It also presents a number of key plays from various periods, examining them in terms of their dramatic qualities, theatrical strengths, social and political contexts, performance history, and relevance today. This course is geared toward students who do not have extensive experience attending or participating in the theatre.

DANCE 100: Intro to Dance

DANCE 100.001 – Hip Hop Freestyle
In this course, we will learn the fundamentals of Hip Hop Freestyle (Bounce, Rock, Roll, Wave, Skate, etc.) and a mix of Social/Party Dances that were created to accompany Hip Hop songs such as ‘Stanky Legg,’ ‘Hit the Quan,’ and ‘Nae Nae.’ Students will develop their ability to freestyle by exploring concepts such as space/traveling, transitions, level changes, direction, and musicality. Emphasizing the context of Hip Hop Culture, we will end classes with practicing in a Cypher (circle). The local and global influences in Hip Hop will be examined through materials such as documentaries, interviews, battles, and event recaps. Utilizing what we learn, we will create a final dance project to share with the public at the end of the term (whether in person or digitally).

DANCE 100.002 – Contemporary Grooves
This course introduces contemporary dance as a dynamic field of practice rather than a single style. Through embodied movement training, reflective writing, and guided discussion, students explore how contemporary dance draws from multiple lineages, techniques, and cultural contexts. The course emphasizes body awareness, strength, and coordination while also engaging questions of how movement is learned, named, and transmitted.

Readings and discussions invite students to consider contemporary dance as a site of inquiry, one that negotiates tradition and experimentation, expression and responsibility, sensation and meaning. By integrating physical practice with reflection, students develop tools to describe, analyze, and articulate contemporary dance in their own words, while recognizing its evolving and contested nature.

Guitar 110: Intro to Guitar
This introductory course in popular guitar style will teach students essential performance skills while building a deeper understanding of the cultural importance of the guitar in popular music. No prior guitar experience needed to enroll.

Guitar 111: Intermediate Guitar
This intermediate pop guitar course will teach students continued technical and performance-based skillsets on the instrument. Guitar 110: Intro to Guitar or comparable guitar experience recommended.

MUSICOL 346: History of Music

This course is a social-ontological study of global and popular music through the lens of musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. We will interrogate the historical, social/cultural and philosophical theory, as well as methodologies through which popular music illuminates societal structures and behavior. Such an undertaking will involve the critical analysis of popular musics from selected social contexts of the globe. By problematizing the notion of “popular culture” and/or “popular music”, we will critically explore popular music as sound and practice – which engenders behavior, discourse, social structures, and methodologies of study. Analytical approaches to the study of this course will include musical and textual transcription, hermeneutics, semiotics, as well as social/cultural analysis (through close readings of discourse). Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to how processes of globalization shape the production, circulation, and consumption of popular music in the digital age. By the end of the course, students should be able to critically analyze how popular music various shapes social entities into complex assemblages.

JAZZ 450/454/455: Contemplative Practice

450/550: The Contemplative Practices Seminar
This seminar introduces sitting meditation. Students follow a daily practice through video instruction by Martha as well as guided meditation audios. Students read
Thich Nhat Hanh’s book: The Miracle of Mindfulness.

455/555: Nature-based Contemplative Practice
This course teaches practices that deepen our connection with the natural world by expanding our conversation with Nature. Students learn the practice of ‘reciprocity’ with the elements of air, fire, water, and earth. These practices renew the connection between humans and their environment and help activate the ‘feeling-state’ of being a member of an earth community.

454/554 Special Topics/”Finding Your Way”
Through reflective writing, this course helps students explore life-path questions. Areas of reflection include: career goals, relationship, values, awareness of the natural world, intentions for participating in community, the role of the arts, and personal priorities.

MUSICOL 122: Intro to World Music

This course introduces students to world soundscapes and cultures through the lens of ethnomusicology – the study of music in the context of culture. It analyzes the ever-changing balance between traditional and modern ideas of music – in systems of learning, performance techniques, and ways of writing and recording music.

MUSICOL 346.001: Black American Popular Music 1900s to Present

In this course, we will examine the history and development of Black American popular musics from their first appearances on recordings to the present. Students will gain familiarity with the emergence, development and reception of the different artists and styles within Black American musical history; keeping an eye towards moments of intersection and divergence. A core component of this class will be taking an interdisciplinary perspective, centered around the combination of academic music studies and the multidisciplinary field of Black studies, as a way to understand Black American popular musics in their historical, social, and cultural context.

MUSICOL 345.001: Music and Society

Engaging the discipline of ethnomusicology, this course examines how various folk, popular, and art music traditions have developed in relation to disparate cultural and social contexts around the world. Through a series of theoretical considerations and case study observations, we will explore how music constructs and conveys meaning, how it shapes and maintains social interactions and identities, and how it evolves in relation to shifting performance contexts, technological developments, and socio-political circumstances. Case studies include musical traditions from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, South America and the Caribbean, among others. Course content will include recorded lectures, synchronous class sessions, audio/visual/reading materials, and weekly online discussion posts.

MUSICOL 345: World Soundscapes

This course introduces undergraduate students to the conceptualization of the notion of soundscapes through the lens of ethnomusicology, music studies, communication studies, cultural anthropology, architecture, and urban studies. We will examine the ways in which the environment, architecture, as well as social and historical conditions give rise to soundscapes, and how these in turn shape meaning, human behavior, and identities. By tracing the use of the term “Soundscape” taking clues from the work of Canadian music composer Murray Schafer and media scholar, Jonathan Sterne, we will critically examine the soundscapes of selected world cultures, including but not limited to the US, Latin America, Japan, South India, Indonesia, Europe, Korea, Papua New Guinea, and Africa. Reflecting upon the dialectical relationship between sonic and non-sonic entities of our world, we will analyze the intertwining nature of the sonic-spatial practices, discourses about sonic practices, as well as the social/political conditions that give rise to such practices in the first place. Positioning varying social processes of producing soundscapes within the context of postcoloniality as well as technological and transnational development, we will critically analyze the ever-interweaving nature of soundscapes – through the lenses of architecture, sound studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, and the recording industry.