These are my unedited lecture notes for The Composer's Craft, a New School undergraduate course that I taught with Yoni Niv in Spring 2011. The general theme of the course was the relationship between composition, technology, and aesthetics. These notes, in their current, incomplete form, do not present a cohesive argument about this relationship—nor, even, a uniform methodology. In general, however, our approach was historical: we tried to show that music technology has a history, and that this history is, from a compositional perspective, undirected and unstable—i.e. that no technology comes with a compositional instruction manual. Historical knowledge reveals alternatives to the compositional status quo, and may give us the confidence to explore alternatives ourselves.
I wrote all the lectures as .html pages, using reStructuredText (.rst). If you prefer a .pdf, click here (but note that some of the media will be missing, and the hyperlinks may not work.)