Master's seminar in the Major syllabus

[trikellymck]

Hi,

I am new to the board, but I have been trying to do some research on a class that I am to take next semester in my graduate courses. It is called seminar in the major and I am trying to see what other universities do for a class for flute seminar in the major. Does anyone have any knowledge of this? I have tried looking around the web for other music school's courses in hopes that I could download a syllabus. I haven't found but a few and they were mainly pedagogy classes. I would love to get a list of what other schools do for this type of thing, what specifically they study in the class and what materials they must have.

I am in a private school where the graduate program is fairly new, I am the first graduate flute performance person and my teacher has not had a graduate flute performance student before. This is all new for the both of us. He did take a course when he got his master's degree years ago, but I was trying to do some research prior to the beginning of the school year as to what I might like to study.

Basically he has said - in what direction do you want to go? So I am up for suggestions!

Thanks,
Kelly

[pied_piper]

In my experience, graduate level seminars tend to be somewhat free-form. (Caveat - my graduate degree is in a different field)

Seminars often do not have a prescribed syllabus because they are intended to allow the student, with concurrence of the guiding professor, to focus on an area of interest and research it more thoroughly. While that should be related to your core curriculum, it may even be on the fringe or slightly outside of it. For example, I am aware of one doctoral student who did his dissertation on flute repair.

So, you might choose to research a particular flute composer, a style, or something very focused like extended techniques for the flute. Let your imagination run a bit wild and come up with several interests to research and then discuss them with your professor. His job is to guide you on how to focus on something that is meaningful and related to one of the topics you would like to research. This can be thought of as a precursor to thesis work.

Here's a link to one university's description of their seminars.
http://www.mcgill.ca/music/node/58

I hope that helps a bit...