Course Description
Poses the questions “What do we mean by tonality?” and “How can we describe music when it challenges the norms of tonality?” Through diverse repertory (much of it from the 19th and early 20th centuries), techniques designed for tonal, chromatic, and post-tonal music are synthesized and expanded to explore answers to those questions.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will have heightened requirements for discussion and class leadership. The final project for graduate students will include a more significant component of original research and larger expectations for the review of the literature.
Athena Title
Dissolution of Tonality
Prerequisite
MUSI 2100 and MUSI 2110
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
The successful student will be able to: * identify and conceptualize surface- and deeper-level chromatic events and place them in relevant tonal contexts; * demonstrate fluency with the basic tools of post-tonal analysis; * discuss the transitional repertory with sensitivity to both tonal and post-tonal concepts and theories; * articulate strenths, weaknesses, and differences among competing theoretical approaches to chromaticism and post-tonal analysis; * construct larger analytical arguments (through written assignments and/or oral presentations) demonstrating higher-level critical thinking; * demonstrate conversational facility (at the master's level) in discussions of chromatic and pos-tonal analyses.
Topical Outline
* Chromaticism as functional expansion * Chromaticism via enharmonic equivalence * Extended tonality, dissonant prolongation, formal fragmentation, and other challenges to traditional tonal structures * Theories of scales and referential collections * Symmetrical harmonic structures * Examination of the early post-tonal repertory
Syllabus