Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0303 - Contemporary Musical Practices

This course will engage the important compositional practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will compose music using post-tonal pitch systems, new scalar and chordal constructions, and expanded formal and textural possibilities. We will focus on the creation of new, non-traditional hierarchies within musical systems with regard to intervals, notions of consonance and dissonance, asymmetrical meters, non-metrical rhythm, and tuning. Students will also be encouraged to develop new compositional strategies through the examination of existing practices such as polytonality, serialism, pitch-class composition, minimalism, and indeterminacy. Prerequisite: Tonal Theory 2. Instructor permission required.

Independent Work In this course, students are expected to spend 8 hours weekly on preparation and work outside of class time.