Document Type
Syllabus
Publication Date
Fall 9-1-2024
Course Description
Music Theory is a music studies discipline in which scholars identify, name, and explore musical phenomena. Theorists study sounds, patterned ways sounds have been or can be organized into music, and how humans find meaning in music and experience it in our brains and bodies. Music Theory has practical applications. It allows one to create, perform, and study music from a position of knowledge about the many organizing principles, styles, and syntaxes music can have. This knowledge provides options: to follow or subvert convention; to emphasize genre or style characteristics for expressive purposes; and to communicate about musical concepts effectively to different audiences. Ideally, Music Theory is a route to artistic agency and communication. In DePauw Music Theory courses, you’ll mostly study phenomena from musical styles that use tonal centricity, the 12-note chromatic scale, and tertian harmony (chords made of stacked thirds). If you pursue a career in music in the U.S., most music you will work with will likely come from this broad category. Within that category, you’ll study phenomena found in styles originating from Afro-diasporic cultures as well as European continental and settler cultures. The curriculum begins with elements of pitch, rhythm, melody, and timbre found across many styles, and increasingly turns to style-specific concepts and style-specific manifestations of shared concepts. This semester, we’ll also look at music organized in ways that aren’t tonal, chromatic, and tertian, including Javanese gamelan and selected classical music from the 20th and 21st centuries. You’ll develop two skills in relation to most phenomena we study: identification and creation. Generally, you’ll learn to identify and create abstract examples of a thing, then move on to identifying and creating examples in the context of larger works. The curriculum takes a spiral approach, returning to subjects across the four semesters with increased complexity. This semester we’ll focus on form and timbre, and their intersections with other musical parameters like rhythm and harmony across styles. We’ll also explore the possibilities and ethics of comparative analysis across styles and cultures. Musical phenomena and the theories people develop to describe them are not neutral: they are shaped by the time, place, culture, values and biases of the people who produce them. As we study musical phenomena and ways Music Theory describes them, we will locate the theories and phenomena in time, place, and cultural context, examining theories’ applications, limitations, and biases. More broadly, we will discuss ways in which Music Theory as a discipline reflects larger systems of oppression, such as racism and sexism, as well as scholars’ efforts to resist and dismantle those systems in the discipline. Music Theory is a living discourse, which we all have the power to shape and expand through critical engagement.
Recommended Citation
Brown, Eliza, "MUS 212 Music Theory IV Brown Fall 2024" (2024). All Course Syllabi. 802, Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University.
https://scholarship.depauw.edu/records_syllabi/802
Student Outcomes
This semester will be devoted to stylistic patterns and forms from the Common Practice Period, Jazz, Popular Music, 20th- and 21st-century concert music, and Indonesian Gamelan. By the end of this course, you will be able to: Analyze music from a wide array of genres and cultures, breaking down pieces into component parts and patterns. Identify shared musical structures and subtleties in communication based on cognitive or cultural expectations, as well as instances that do not follow normative patterns of particular stylistic contexts. Compose music that makes use of stylistically expected patterns, both to better understand how to perform music from these styles, and as a launching point for creating your own style of music composition.