Hartt's music history program enables you to explore Western music in its historical and cultural contexts. From broad survey courses to in-depth special seminars, majors, minors, you gain a comprehensive understanding of all periods of Western music. As an important feature of our curriculum is flexible elective courses that are suited to your interests and needs, our electives are often designed with our current students in mind. To that end, courses offered within the last two years have included opera history, string quartet literature, C.P.E. Bach, pre-tonal theory and analysis, medievalism in modern media, cognitive psychology, and critical editing, students may also take courses on jazz and African-American musical traditions in the Jackie McLean Jazz Studies Division.
In addition to Hartt's rigorous coursework, you will participate in a number of performance organizations, including our Baroque ensemble, the Collegium Musicum. Hartt's wide collection of early instruments, including recorders, Renaissance lutes and flutes, harpsichords, clavichord, Baroque bows, shawms, and sackbuts, are available and provide you with an active and creative learning environment. Within the music history major, undergraduates will choose between our scholarship and research emphasis and our performance practice emphasis. Our scholarship and research emphasis systematically investigates various elements of music in written papers, employing a rigorous scholarly approach. Our performance practice emphasis combines your interest in performing with the study of treatises, earlier performance techniques, ornamentation, and related issues. Master's students may choose among scholarship and research, performance practice, or music history pedagogy for their emphasis. Our music history pedagogy emphasis pairs our music history program with Hartt's music education program for a rigorous exploration of current trends in pedagogical technique and historical methods.
