Music 444 - Twentieth-Cent Analysis

How can we recognize a composer's voice in different pieces of music? How do composers develop a personal style? In this seminar we will study what constitute composers' personal style. Our primary text will be compositions by strong personalities from twentieth-century music, among them Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and Olivier Messiaen, whose style had a disproportionately large influence on composers coming after them. We will learn to read and understand their complex scores and to write about them in a way that explains both their compositional technique and captures the particular sonic world of their music. For their final projects, students will analyze the style of a composer of their choice or of their own developing compositional voice. Two class meetings and two ear-training sections per week. Fulfills either the departmental seminar requirement or the comprehensive exam requirement for the major.

Requisite: MUSI 241 or 242, or consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Móricz. The course will be offered Hyflex with as much individual/in-person contact as practical.