Senior Seminar

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Senior Seminar synthesizes the plethora of tools and techniques a music major has acquired throughout their Davidson career in our department: active listening, historical inquiry and research, critical and musical analysis, methods of transmitting music (via notation, oral, or technological means), and performance practice.

Topics change each year and are chosen by the course instructor.

Past Topics

  • Music and Privilege (2020-2022) – Neil Lerner

  • Music and Sound in Horror Film (2019) – Neil Lerner

  • Leonard Bernstein (2018 & 2010) – Bill Lawing

  • Music and Disability Studies (2017) – Neil Lerner

  • Birth of a Nation (2015, cross-listed with FMS) – Neil Lerner

  • Video Game Music (2014, cross-listed with FMS) – Neil Lerner

  • Musical Cultures of the 1980s (2013) – Ross Fenimore, visiting faculty

  • Music of Scandinavia (2012) – Tara Keith

  • Music and Meaning (2011) – Sandra Graham, visiting faculty

  • The Legacy of Beethoven (2010) – Ray Sprague

  • Nationalism and Music (2008) – Mauro Botelho

  • Music and Contemporary Cultural Studies (2007) – Neil Lerner

  • Award-Winning Composers and Pieces 1985-2003: The Pulitzer Prize in Music and Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition (2005) – Jennifer Stasack

  • Music and War (2004) – Neil Lerner

  • Hitchcock and Hermann (2003) – Neil Lerner

  • Allusion, Borrowing, and Collage: Appropriation Techniques in 20th Century Music (2002) – Mauro Botelho

  • Music and Gender (2001) – Neil Lerner