Transcript title

Music Theory IIC

Credits

3

Grading mode

Standard letter grades

Total contact hours

30

Lecture hours

30

Recommended preparation

MUS 212. Recommended to be taken with

Course Description

A continuation of common-practice period harmony (Music Theory I) with stress on chromatic resources, musical form, and style analysis including an introduction to harmonic practices of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Course learning outcomes

1. Analyze music composed with the 12-tone technique and compose a small work in this style.
2. Use the appropriate musical vocabulary related to French Impressionism, Post-impressionism and Expressionism to discuss and analyze works composed in that style.
3. Describe the basic elements of music as they have evolved during the past century of composition.
4. Discuss the history and intellectual climate that inspired composers towards atonality and serial techniques, and analyze works composed in that genre.
5. Describe the advent of electronic music and the uses and innovations that this style of music has precipitated in the past 75 years.
6. Use musical vocabulary developed over the past century to describe and analyze other contemporary compositional techniques, such as minimalism, invention of new instruments, additive meter, metrical modulation, et cetera.

Content outline

1. Quartal and Quintal harmonies, Chord Clusters
2. Set theory concepts and analysis of music using this technique
3. History and Analysis of works composed using Twelve-tone (serialism) technique
4. Composition of simple works using serialism technquies
5. History and analysis of contemporary compositions (post 1950) using techniques such as indeterminacy, silence, graphic scores, text scores, minimalism et cetera
6. General history of electronic music and Neo-romanticism

Required materials

This course may require the textbook used in previous music theory courses. (Please see the syllabus for details.)