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21M.260

Music since 1900

3-0-9 units. HASS-A · Undergraduate

Surveys musical works drawn from many genres, representing stylistic movements that have transformed classical music over the past hundred years. Focal topics include musical modernism, serialism, neoclassicism, nationalism and ideology, minimalism, and aleatoric and noise composition experiments. Discusses electronic and computer music, and new media and the postmodern present. Begins with Stravinsky's early ballets and ends with music by current MIT composers and other important figures active today. Ability to read music required. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication provided.

Spring 2016 · Stravinsky to the Present

This course provides an overview of the musical styles and techniques developed over the past 115 years. The anthology and supplemental listening will present a range of art music aesthetics in a variety of genres such as chamber music, symphonic and choral music, and opera. While tuning your ears to novel sounds, you will hone your own preferences and aim to understand the motivations behind and importance of a wide diversity of compositional orientations, including Expressionism, Impressionism, atonality, neo-Classicism, serialism, nationalism, the influence of jazz and popular idioms, post-tonality, electronic music, aleatory, performance art, post-modernism, minimalism, spectralism, the New Complexity, neo-Romanticism, and post-minimalism.

Readings

  • Auner, Joseph. Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries . W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. ISBN: 9780393929201. (Also available in eBook format, ISBN: 9780393904604)
    Listed reading
  • ———. Anthology for Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries . W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. ISBN: 9780393920215.
    Listed reading

Prerequisites & course information

Prereq: 21M.301 or permission of instructor U (Spring) 3-0-9 units. HASS-A

Sources