New Courses!

On the St. Cloud State University homepage a story is currently posted about some new courses that I'll be teaching in the Fall. This is part of the rollout of a new major called Music and New Media that some of us have been working on introducing for the last few years.

My basic conception of the program is that it addresses a fundamental aspect of composition - that is, collaboration. The first work I composed outside of private lessons was for a dancer. The second was for the theatre. Since then, I've had many more requests for multi-disciplinary collaborations. I hoped to create a program that introduced students to creative uses of music and technology, gave them a solid musical background, and also provided them the opportunity to learn a bit about other disciplines. We've built in about a dozen open credits that are intended to be used to develop skills in a non-musical field, such as Visual Art, English, Mass Communications, Computer Science, etc. Our hope is not to create a student that can do everything, but rather one that is comfortable with the working methods and language of collaboration. These students will be well suited for working in multimedia, web design, video games, etc, providing sound design.

This Fall I'm teaching a course called DIY Audio, in which students will rip apart cheap electronics and then put them back together in interesting and chaotic ways. Get out your soldering irons, this class ought to be a lot of fun!