2024-2025 Catalog

MUSC 351 Music Theory IV

This course invites students to use their growing knowledge of harmony and musicianship to study large-scale form and how it is built out of small-scale parts. Students will compare musical form in several traditions, viewing form types as genres deeply intertwined with those traditions’ conceptions of time and pitch space as well as with social and cultural meanings. Traditions studied include: large-scale form in electronic dance music genres, built out of beats, layers, and loops, which fosters utopian, ecstatic dance spaces; sonata form in Western classical music and the “tonal drama” of key pairings; Raag and Taal in Hindustani Classical Music as the building blocks for improvised forms which invoke particular moods or rasa in listeners; and experimental compositional and analytic techniques of 20th and 21st century art music, especially extending beyond the 12-note equal-tempered scale. The culmination of the sequence includes a substantial scholarly analytical paper. Includes both a lecture section, and a musicianship lab section focusing on continued training in tonal and atonal sight-singing, dictation, and listening.

Credits

4 units

Prerequisite

MUSC 251 or permission of instructor

Corequisite

MUSC 351A

Core Requirements Met

  • Fine Arts