MUSC 351 Music Theory IV
This course is the culmination of the music theory sequence, and focuses on scholarly reading and writing of music theory, building up to each student writing a substantial original research paper at the end of the semester. 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; Raag and Taal in Hindustani Classical Music as the building blocks for improvised forms which invoke particular moods or rasa in listeners; and the gradual abandonment of classical harmony in favor of experimental compositional and analytic techniques in 20th and 21st century art music, including 12-tone rows, pitch class sets, and expansion beyond the equal-tempered scale. Includes both a lecture section, and a musicianship lab section focusing on continued training in tonal and atonal sight-singing, dictation, and listening.
Prerequisite
MUSC 251 or permission of instructor
Corequisite
MUSC 351A