MusM Music (Performance Studies) / Course details

This course aims to develop students’ understanding of key issues in the discipline of music theory and analysis by introducing them to a range of influential methodologies and key analytical debates. It presents a survey of significant and representative analytical approaches from the nineteenth century to the present day, and assesses their applicability to music from Beethoven to Scriabin. The course is structured on three levels, according to analytical method, theoretical issue, and musical repertoire, and concentrates each week on a match between one or more of each. The course further aims to develop students’ critical engagement with current and historical trends in music analysis, culminating in an independent analytical project of a chosen work or works.

This unit aims:

• to improve students music-analytical skills;
• to familiarise students with a range techniques for analysing tonal and post-tonal music, with an equal emphasis on theoretical understanding and practical application;
• to equip students with the necessary skills and intellectual tools to undertake their own independent analytical project;
• to enable students effectively to compare, contextualise and critique different perspectives and analytical methodologies and to communicate that in writing and orally;
• to lay the foundations for postgraduate analytical and technical work.

• demonstrate advanced knowledge and in-depth understanding of a range of music-analytical techniques appropriate for tonal and post-tonal repertoires;
• demonstrate an ability to employ these techniques appropriately;
• construct detailed analyses of a range of Western score-based music using accepted models;

• show an understanding of theoretical writings upon which analytical methods are based.

• understand, apply, and evaluate various music-analytic methods;
• interpret and critique advanced analytical texts.

• resent specialist musical notation clearly and appropriately;
• work on and produce an independent project to a given deadline;
• articulate, discuss and support findings coherently in an oral presentation;
• show developing abilities in argumentation and interpretation, and the ability to work with a broad range of texts and scores.

• undertake group work and collaboration;

• demonstrate the ability to synthesize and evaluate material systematically to produce arguments that are communicated clearly in both written and verbal form;
• show an ability to produce independent work displaying critical self-awareness;
• demonstrate the ability to communicate ideas and information coherently in written and verbal form.

Agawu, V. Kofi, ‘How we got out of Analysis, and How to get back in again’ Music Analysis, 23/ii-iii (2004), 267–86.

Bent, Ian, Analysis (London, 1987).

Caplin, William E., James Hepokoski and James Webster, ed. Pieter Bérge, Musical Form, Forms, and Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009).

Cohn, Richard, ‘As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert’, 19th-Century Music, 22 (1999), 213-32.

Cook, Nicholas, and Mark Everist, Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Horton, Julian, ‘Postmodernism and the Critique of Musical Analysis’, The Musical Quarterly 85/ii (2001), 342–66.

Kerman, Joseph, ‘How we got into Analysis, and How to get out’, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980), 311–31; published as `The State of Academic Music Criticism', in Kingsley Price (ed.), On Criticizing Music: Five Philosophical Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 38–54; reprinted in Kerman, Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 12–32.

Morgan, Robert, P., ‘The Concept of Unity and Musical Analysis’, Music Analysis, 22 (2003), 7–50.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate

(Princeton, 1990).