BA Music and Drama

This is an analytical course principally concerned with nineteenth-century chamber and vocal music. It examines aspects of form, harmony, motivic working and text-setting with a view to developing students' abilities to understand and write about complex musical works. The course also aims to expand the student’s understanding of some theoretical models commonly encountered in Western art music of this period (c.1800–1860).

In this way, it builds on the foundations laid in ‘Tonality: Form and Function’ in the first semester, and aims to increase the student’s understanding of the language, structure, and expressive content of nineteenth-century tonal music, and so to enhance his/her response to it as a listener/analyst, and as a performer.

Free choice (UG), but note a pre-requisite of MUSC10011

This unit aims:

• to increase the student's understanding of the language, structure and expressive content of nineteenth-century tonal music;
• to improve students music-analytical skills;
• to give students the fundamental tools to undertake their own analysis;
• to familiarise students with analytical techniques for analysing Western tonal music;
• to prepare students for undertaking level 2 and 3 analytical courses.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• understand the harmonic, thematic, and formal structure of tonal music;
• demonstrate knowledge of various music-analytical methods appropriate for tonal repertoire of both instrumental and vocal genres;
• show how stylistically sensitive analytical and interpretative techniques and strategies can be applied to selected compsotions.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• demonstrate increased knowledge of a range of nineteenth-century repertoires;
• analyse a range of Western score-based music using accepted models;
• comprehend theoretical nomenclature and assess its relevance;
• apply theoretical approaches to a specific musical composition or extract;
• construct analyses of short tonal works.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• annotate a musical score with relevant analytical symbols;
• demonstrate their ability to employ specialist terminology and musical notation to analyse a given work;
• write a piece of analytical prose.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• demonstrate enhanced analytical skills;
• demonstrate aesthetic awareness;
• employ technical vocabulary for analytic and descriptive purposes;
• exhibit attention to detail.

EXAM 100%

• Oral feedback on tasks given in workshops;
• Peer feedback in workshops;
• Additional one-to-one feedback (during consultation hour or by making an appointment).

Cohn, Richard L., ‘“As Wonderful as Star Clusters”: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert’,

              19th-Century Music, 22/iii (1999), pp. 213–32.

Hepokoski, James, and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations  

             in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Hyland, Anne M., ‘Rhetorical Closure in the First Movement of Schubert’s String Quartet in C major,

              D46: a Dialogue with Deformation’, Music Analysis, 28/i (2009), 111–142.

Kinderman, William, and Harald Krebs, eds., The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality

               (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

Kopp, David, Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge

               University Press, 2002).

Krebs, Harald, ‘Alternatives to Monotonality in Early Nineteenth-Century Music’, Journal of Music

               Theory, 25/i (1981), 1-16.

Rosen, Charles, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Schmidt-Beste, Thomas, The Sonata. Cambridge Introductions to Music (Cambridge: Cambridge

                University Press, 2011).

Stein, Deborah, and Robert Spillman, Poetry into Song: Performance and Analysis of Lieder (Oxford:

                Oxford University Press, 1996).