Musicianship and Analysis 4: from 1890-present

4.0 credits

This course introduces students to Western art music from 1890 to the present and teaches them skills and techniques for analyzing this repertoire and composing music using twentieth- and twenty-first century techniques. Unlike other courses in the core curriculum, TH220 combines written theory and aural skills into a single course. In addition to studying analysis and composition, students will learn strategies for the successful performance and aural apprehension of music in late Romantic, post-tonal, and extended tonal languages. The course is not a survey of every trend since 1890. Instead, it focuses on selected topics including impressionism, twentieth-century tonality, novel use of scales, symmetrical approaches to pitch organization, atonality and pitch-class set theory, twelve-tone theory, extended serialism, and contemporary compositional techniques.