BA Music and Drama

This course is a gateway to exploring some of the most influential analytical theories that have shaped the field of Music Theory and Analysis over the past century. It covers a wide range of current and past scholarship including analytical approaches to Western art music and popular music, voice-leading analysis, music semiology (musical meaning), mathematical approaches, feminist theory and gender and sexuality studies. The course explores repertoire ranging from Western art music of the 1750s to the sounds of the early 2000s. It aims to develop students’ critical thinking and elevate their listening and writing skills culminating in an independent analytical project on a chosen work or works.  

 

Either MUSC20011 or MUSC20222 is a pre-requisite to MUSC30011

Must have taken either MUSC20011 or MUSC20222

This unit aims:

• to improve students music-analytical skills
• to familiarise students with a range of techniques for analysing tonal and post-tonal music, with an equal emphasis on theoretical understanding and practical application
• to give students the tools to undertake their own independent analytical project
• to critically assess the theories introduced by the course
• to lay the foundations for postgraduate analytical and technical work

 

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

• apply music theory in appropriate and creative ways; 
• critically assess the theories introduced by the course;
• produce an independent analytical project.

 

Indicative topics to be covered:

• Schenkerian analysis
• The theories of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples
• Jean-Jacques Nattiez and musical semiology (‘musical meaning’)
• Topic analysis
• Neo-Riemannian Theory
• Set Theory
• The Postmodern critique of musical analysis and gender studies  
• The new Formenlehre
• Analysis of Popular Musics
• Recent trends in Music Theory and Analysis 

Core course content will be delivered in two-hour lectures: these will introduce relevant theories, discuss several examples, and help students to develop critical thinking and technical ability in a worked musical example.

In weekly seminars ,students will offer formalised responses to a critical question and/or text and musical example. Comments will be given from the course tutor verbally (in advance of the presentation during consultation hours if arranged, and during the seminars).

Directed reading and a broad range of listening is fundamental to the course, and will inform the weekly responses.

Individual learning support will be offered through consultation hours.

Online Canvas and Spotify  provision.

Students enrolled on this module are encouraged to participate in the Manchester Music Theory and Analysis Reading Group, which meets three times during the semester on the first Wednesday of the month. 

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

• 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 and creatively;
• use accepted theoretical models to construct detailed interpretations of a range of Western score-based music; 
• show an understanding of theoretical writings upon which analytical methods are based.

 

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

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

 

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

• present specialist musical notation clearly and appropriately;
• work on an independent project to a given deadline;
• demonstrate skills in oral presentation;
• show developing abilities in argumentation and interpretation, and the ability to work with a broad range of texts and scores.

 

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

• 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.

Individual presentation (summative)

10%

Independent project (summative)

90%

 

• Oral feedback on students’ responses in weekly seminars
• Written feedback on coursework assignments 1 and 2
• Additional one-to-one feedback (during consultation hour or by making an appointment)

 

• Agawu, V. Kofi, ‘How we got out of Analysis, and How to get back in again’ Music Analysis, 23/ii-iii (2004), 267–86.
• Agawu, V. Kofi, Playing with Signs: a Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, 1991).
• Bent, Ian, Analysis (London, 1987).
• Cohn, Richard, ‘As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert’, 19th-Century Music, 22 (1999), 213-32.
• Cook, Nicholas, A Guide to Musical Analysis (Oxford, 1987).
• Forte, Allen, The Structure of Atonal Music (Yale University Press, 1973).
• 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).
• Schenker, Heinrich, ‘Ihr Bild (August 1828): Song by Franz Schubert to a Lyric by Heinrich Heine’', Der Tonwille, Vol. 1 (1921), trans. Robert Pascall, Music Analysis, 19/i (2000), 3-9.
• Spicer, Mark, ‘Fragile, Emergent, and Absent Tonics in Pop and Rock Songs’, Music Theory Online, 23/ii (2017).