Overview
Syllabus
Summer Session A 2025 (4 credits)
MWF: 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Course Director: esperanza spalding;
Other Contributing Faculty: Robert Bilder; rbilder@mednet.ucla.edu); Marco Iacoboni iacoboni@ucla.edu
Instructor Office: (TBD); Office hours: (TBD).
Teaching Fellow/Research Assistant Name(s), Office Hours, email information, Location: (TBD)
Council comprises a group of individuals proficient in music creation and/or research and practice in the therapeutic power of music and collaborative music making. (Members TBD).
This course will include in-person instruction. Both undergraduate and graduate students will be included, and the expectations are the same for students at all levels.
Course Materials
- Course reader (articles to be distributed for each topic will be available on Bruin Learn for direct download by students).
- Bruin Learn course site (under construction; all readings and assignments will be on Bruin Learn).
Course Description
Part songwrighting workshop, and part guided-research practice, the Songwrights’ Apothecary Lab (SAL), offers a structure for the collaborative development of new compositions designed to offer enhanced therapeutic benefit to listeners/participants.
The course is rooted in transdisciplinary scholarship and practice, orienting itself towards archives, research, and literature that study healing strategies drawn from a diverse range of music-based creative and therapeutic practices. People from all fields related to human health are invited to participate in this course (including music, dance, public-health, music therapy, neuroscience, psychology, education or other allied disciplines).
Fluency in interdisciplinary group collaboration, some form of musicianship (which may be singing, or music production/sampling), and experience culling and discerning information from various research sources are all prerequisites for participation in this course. Students enrolled in this course are not expected to have professional-level, or conservatory-level music skills: a basic ability to effectively create and perform music according to one’s own aesthetic and ability is essential. The course application provides an opportunity to describe your background and provide a recorded sample of your music, and will be reviewed by a council of advisors in order to select a class that is balanced in background and experience (please email TA-TBD@ucla.edu with any questions).
esperanza will guide course participants through the portions of our lab which relate to songwrighting (song crafting), developing research directives, distilling and integrating research into new music, and presenting what we create for audiences.
Throughout this course, our experiments and creating/administering process will be overseen and supported by a council of seasoned professionals from various fields relating to human-health and its intersections with music. The support of this council may take shape in various ways. Some you can expect are:
- Offering guidance and direction on how to draw from research related to music in therapeutic contexts.
- Sharing knowledge from their respective fields of experience (particularly council members who actively research or work with music as a therapeutic tool).
- Informing us about ethics and care considerations related to crafting and sharing the music we create.
- Listening, sensing, and offering constructive critique/insights in response to drafts and finished songs we create in the lab.
- Serving as a sounding-board for unforeseen concerns, areas of inquiry, or anything else that comes up in relation to the exploring and work we do in the lab.
- Sharing insights about how to communicate and engage with audiences/listeners of the music we create to ensure consent and informed participation.
In partnership with Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science and The Music Center, the course will reinforce community connections and place-based relevance of the work with three classes shaped as Sharebacks during which the broader LA community will be invited to engage with and give feedback on the songs crafted by the UCLA cohort of students and academics. Although the 6-weeks of classes will take place at UCLA, these 3 classes will exceptionally take place off-site in LA (location and dates TBC).
Learning Outcomes for this Course
Participants in the Songwrights Apothecary Lab are invited into a praxis for integrating known and emergent therapeutic music/song components into new, context-specific, collaboratively created music. “Collaboration” in our case means an interdisciplinary practice, where all participants in the lab contribute material, research, music-creation, knowledge from their field, and aesthetic taste to create new songs. This newly crafted songs will be shared and studied to learn more about which elements* may increase or decrease the efficacy of music as a therapeutic aide, as well as the efficacy of collaborative praxis between researchers in various fields related to human health.
Participants in this course are expected to:
- Demonstrate interdisciplinary collaboration through their interactions with other participants and council members.
- Apply research skills to identify aspects of music that contribute to therapeutic outcomes and contribute to well-being.
- Integrate the insights from scholarly research into collaborative music-making.
- Show increased self- and other-awareness, as manifest in their sharing of personal insights and contributions to group processes.
- Reflect on how the SAL experience can be integrated into their future scholarship, musicianship, and personal goals.
How to Succeed in this Course (Expectations for Students)
Each time a Songwrights Apothecary Lab course happens, its shape and scope are devised in response to the discoveries, successes, learns, and constructive-failures of previous iterations. Some of our work will be intentionally emergent. Please feel free to ask questions, offer suggestions, and experiment with your own creative generative practices, tracking and sharing the results as you see fit.
Much of our work in this course will happen in small work-groups comprised of 4 – 6 students. Half of the students in each work-group will engage with the lab as songwrighters (integrating research findings into music), and half will engage as researchers (focusing on the intended therapeutic effect of a to-be-created song as a research question and directive, and sharing their findings with the songwrighters in their work-group). Each participant in the lab will alternate between collaborating as a songwright, and as a researcher within these work-groups. These groups will change personnel every 2 weeks to ensure each student has the chance to collaborate at least once with everyone enrolled in the course.
All students enrolled in this course will be required to participate in music creation, performance, listening, and reflection on their experiencing of the music created in this lab. Students will also be required to do extensive research, drawing from various sources, and effectively communicate these findings to their fellow lab participants.
It is essential for all participants to communicate questions or confusions about any aspect of our group-work or assignments, as well as any aspect of the experimental work we will engage in during this course. If you are unsure about something or realize that some element of our work is unclear, please reach out as soon as you can so we can make the most of our short 6 weeks in this lab!
Songwrighting exercises will be offered on Wednesday (these are exercises designed to develop songwrighting capacity. Students should plan to have time/space between Wednesday’s meeting and Friday’s meeting where they can spend time with the musical exercise. These may or may not be shared within the lab, but they help prep the songwrighters for their collaborative songwrighting process. Students will receive their songwrighting assignments and materials on Friday. These will be shared in the lab on the following Monday. Between Friday meetings, and the following Monday’s meeting, students should plan to have time/space where they can work on creating their songs.
Helping You Succeed & Creating an Inclusive Classroom Community (Instructor, TA, and Community Expectations)
esperanza, the teaching team including Teaching Fellows/Research Assistants and Council members are committed to the success of all participants in an interdisciplinary and inclusive environment. Diversity, equity and inclusion are cornerstones of this course and everyone in our SAL community is expected to uphold and manifest both the spirit and practice of inclusive action and open collaboration. If you experience any discrimination or have questions about how our commitment to inclusion is being demonstrated in the class, we encourage you to share with esperanza or Teaching Fellows/Research Assistants during regular office hours, or during class discussions if you are comfortable with that. UCLA’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion provides resources, events, and information about current initiatives at UCLA to support equality for all members of the UCLA community.
How Your Learning Will Be Assessed (Grading Policy)
This course will be graded pass/fail, but we expect and aim to support all students to achieve a passing grade.
All students are expected to engage in music creation, research, group discussion, integrate research findings and feedback from our council, and offer content-related feedback in response to songs created and shared within this lab. The Teaching Fellows/Research Assistants attending each class will evaluate students’ contributions during that session and discuss with esperanza and the council. If a student appears to be having difficulty engaging in the work, our team will aim to identify barriers to their engagement and offer suggestions to enhance the student’s experience and engagement in subsequent classes. Growth in engagement over the course of the class will be seen as a strength.
Musical ability is not a factor contributing to effective participation in this course. Completing the assignments (including musical assignments), integrating research and guidance from our council, and contributing one’s respective portion of group-work will constitute successful engagement with this course. These contributions will also be assessed by Teaching Fellows/Research Assistants with oversight from esperanza.
Grading Scale: Pass-Fail
Information about Our Course Assignments
This draft syllabus is under active development and more details will be posted on Bruin Learn before the classes begin. A core element of this course is its dynamic evolutionary approach to collaborative songwrighting as a process that does not have a predetermined outcome and to which new ideas from research may be incorporated as these arise in collective conversations. This draft contains exemplary readings that will be supplemented before the course begins, with the expectation that additional material will be infused into the curriculum as the course progresses with input from all participants.