Document Type
Syllabus
Publication Date
Fall 9-1-2024
Course Description
The two-semester sequence of Music Theory and Musicianship courses will introduce you to foundational skills and concepts for collegiate music study, and build your fluency with those skills and concepts. You will learn about broadly applicable musical phenomena in the domains of pitch relationships, rhythm, timbre, and form, and gain fluency with those concepts through skill-building activities. These activities include multi-modal practice drills and games, composition, improvisation, performance, transcription, sight-reading, aural identification, music analysis, music technology applications, and writing about music. This course also builds keyboard and vocal skills: concepts will be practiced at the piano, vocally (using moveable Do solfege), and on your primary instrument, if different. Musical phenomena and the language people use 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 and practice musical phenomena, we will locate them in time, place, and cultural context, as well as in current conversations within the academic discipline of Music Theory, under which this course falls. By the end of the two-semester sequence, you will be prepared to discuss, analyze, and create music in 200-level music courses and beyond. You will have a skill and knowledge foundation that will enable you to continue gaining fluency in specific Musicianship skill sets in 200-level courses and beyond.
Recommended Citation
Brown, Eliza, "MUS 140 Music Theory and Musicianship I Brown Fall 2024" (2024). All Course Syllabi. 818, Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University.
https://scholarship.depauw.edu/records_syllabi/818
Student Outcomes
his semester will be devoted to acoustics, intervals, triads and their inversions, the dominant seventh chord, and simple and compound meters up to two levels of subdivision. By the end of this course, students will be able to: Sing, play at the keyboard, and identify by ear the topics listed above. Compose notated music and improvise music that incorporate these topics. Analyze and discuss (orally and in writing) occurrences of these topics in notated music using appropriate terminology.