BA Music and Drama

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.

Must have taken either MUSC20011 or MUSC20222

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 give students the tools to undertake their own independent analytical project
• to critically assess the theories introduced by the course
• to lay foundations for postgraduate analytical and technical work

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

• critically assess the theories introduced by the course
• produce an independent analytical project

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
• 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

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
• demonstrate the ability to communicate ideas and information clearly in written and verbal form

• 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
• Bent, Ian, Analysis (London, 1987)
• Cohn, Richard, ‘As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert’, 19^th-Century Music, 22 (1999), 213-32
• Cook, Nicholas, A Guide to Musical Analysis (Oxford, 1987)
• 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)