MUS 221 - Form and Listening

Designed for both music majors and nonmajors, this class will consider music history from the perspective of studying and listening through musical form. Students will learn about recurring principles and historically situated formal tendencies encountered in a range of repertory, including concert music (strophic, through-composed, fugue, and sonata forms), popular music and jazz (12-bar blues and verse-chorus structures), and electronic and experimental practices. Repertory will be considered in historical context and will be explored through such concepts as repetition, contrast, and return; stability and instability; teleological vs. looping and cyclical processes; and improvisation. The course will teach students to hear and critically assess musical form and think about the ways that the structured presentation of musical ideas can shape meaning and experience for listeners.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Music 221 can be taken independently of Music 222.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).