An Invitation to Form & Analysis |
Coursework & Instruction |
This course continues an exploration of musical structures, taking the skills and concepts developed in freshman and sophomore theory and aural skills courses and applying them to more advanced study of music of the tonal period in Western music (roughly 1600–1950). Like all courses in the music theory and aural skills sequence, the goal is musical fluency. I want you to be able to successfully deposit and retrieve musical knowledge in your long-term memory and assimilate new musical concepts and structures.
This term, our primary concerns will be to ensure that by the end you: Instill in yourself the thought and process whereby the analysis of music leads to better understanding and better performance of music.
Since musical fluency is at the heart of this course, just as it is for all your music classes, we will set out to develop our understanding and application of the musical concepts listed above. I intend for us to engage these concepts at multiple cognitive levels. While basic facts like terms and such are necessary and important, they are the lowest level of cognitive engagement. I do not want the trees to blind you to seeing the forest, so we will seek to deepen our grasp of analytical and musical sensitivity by developing our own ability to artfully and skillfully think in music and communicate about it. |
This course is the capstone following a four-semester sequence in music theory. In-class activities will consist primarily of large- or small-group analytical discussion of concepts, guided work (in groups or individually) on challenging musical passages, Q&As, class presentations, and short lectures.
Out-of-class activities will consist primarily of occasional readings, analytical practice and preparation, regular précis writing assignments, and a preparation of a final analysis paper and oral presentation. Approximately every two weeks, you will turn in a précis of 500–1500 words in which you provide a critical summary of all the class has covered since the the previous précis (about two-weeks worth of material). The purpose of these assignments is twofold:
I will share a Google doc for each student. There you will write (or copy/paste) your précis when it is due, one after another. There I will provide feedback and suggestions for improvement. Rather than dividing the term into units, we will use use form, one of the topical cornerstones of the course, as an extended metaphor to frame our very experience. Thus, the course’s organization will echo a kind of sonata form (or at least some sort of rounded binary form) in the following way:
Interspersed among sections of this framework will be episodes that explore various types of analytical techniques that will likely be unfamiliar, thus providing you with new tools for your analytical tool belt. |