TEXT:  Morgan, Robert P.  Twentieth-Century Music.  New York:  W.W. Norton & Co., 1991.
 
COURSE OBJECTIVES:  MUH 4371 is a survey of the history, literature, and theoretical developments in the music of the twentieth century.  It is designed to cover the following areas:
 1.  Establish familiarity with the major composers and stylistic movements of the twentieth century.
  2.  Develop an understanding of the major compositional and theoretical innovations of the twentieth century through analysis and composition exercises.
 3.  Acquire a listening familiarity with specific masterworks and general styles of the twentieth century.
 4.  Explore the philosophical/aesthetic basis of the music of the twentieth century and its relationship with developments in visual arts and literature.
 5.  Develop writing skills and research techniques in historical musicology.

COURSE PROCEDURES:  Class sessions will be devoted to lecture, discussion, and demonstration of musical examples by sound recordings, videotapes, and musical scores.  Students will be expected to read the appropriate sections of text before lecture sessions.  Course content will not follow the text exclusively, and will contain information which is not in the text; therefore, regular attendance will be necessary for comprehension of the subject matter and will be required.
    Two exams will be given during the course, a mid-term and a final.  Exams will consist of announced essay questions and listening examples.  Listening selections will be made available on cassette tapes in the Music Department Office.   Whenever possible, scores will be made available.  In addition to the tests, periodic assignments in analysis of scores and composition will be given throughout the course.  The average grade of these assignments will be the equivalent of one test grade.
    In addition, students will be required to submit a research project, 12-15 pages in length, dealing with some aspect of the serious music of the twentieth century.  This paper may be historical, analytical, or a combination of both.  Papers will be graded on content, bibliographic form and documentation, and clarity and quality of writing.  The topic of the project must be approved by Dr. Keaton.  Students taking the course for graduate or honors credit will submit two papers, one dealing with music before 1950, the other dealing with music after 1950.   The final grade will be determined by the average of the two exam grades, the average grade of the homework assignments, and the grade on the research project.  Class participation and preparation may also be considered in the final grade.

"A man who has walked, jumped, or dived into the abyss is no more in awe of its depths--that suits people who stay on the edge and dare not go down".
   -- Ferruccio Busoni, 1905

"I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices.  It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe.  This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare.  I stir the soup.  I inconvenience you.  I make your nose run and your eyeballs water".
   -- Harlan Ellison, in Revealed! What Killed the Dinosaurs! (and you don't look so good, yourself)

Grading scale: 93-100 = A,  90-92 = A-, 87-89 - B+, 83-87 = B, 80-82 = B-, 77-79 = C+, 70-76 = C, 67-69 = C-, 66-67 = D+, 63-65 = D, 60-62 = D-, 59 or below = F

CLASS SCHEDULE -- WEEK OF:
8/25:  Introduction and rationale.  Sources of twentieth-century style and aesthetics.  The developments of 1912-13.  Debussy's Jeux.  Gesture, synthetic scales, planing (Ch. I - II)

9/1:  LABOR DAY HOLIDAY, 9/1:  1912-13, continued.  Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps.  Primitivism, metric irregularity, polytonality (Ch. IV)

9/8:   Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21. Expressionism, non-tonal motivic chromaticism (Ch. III).

9/15:  RESEARCH PROJECT TOPIC DUE.  The Second Viennese School.  Berg and Wozzeck.  Webern and the Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 and the Five Pieces For Orchestra, Op. 10.

9/22:   The music of Bartok.  String Quartet no. 4.  Synthetic scales, symmetrical scales, tone clusters, quartal harmony. (Ch. IV)

9/29:  The music and theories of Paul Hindemith.  Intervalic relationships of dissonance.  Mathis der Maler Symphonie. Prokofieff and the Piano Sonata No. 8. (Ch. X)

10/6:   Benjamin Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Charles Ives,  Three Places in New England and the Concord Sonata. (Ch. VI and XII)

10/13: MID-TERM EXAM DUE.  Techniques of dodecaphonic composition and analysis.  Development and use of the matrix.  (Ch. IX)

10/20:  Schoenberg's Suite for Piano, Op. 25 and Variations for Orchestra Op. 31.  Berg's Violin Concerto.  Webern's Symphonie Op. 21.

10/27:  Contributions of Olivier Messiaen.  Non-retrogradable rhythms, scales of limited transposition, isorhythmic techniques, total serialization.  Quatour pour le fin du temps (Ch. XV - XVI).
 
11/3:  RESEARCH PROJECT BIBLIOGRAPHIES DUE.  The Ultra-rational composers.  Darmstadt:  Boulez, Babbitt, Stockhausen, Nono, Maderna.  Boulez' Pli selon pli.  Electronic music:  musique concrete and Varese. (Chs. XIII and XVI).

11/10:  VETERANS DAY HOLIDAY, 11/11.   John Cage and Anti-rational aleatory.  Philosophy and influence. Problems of notation in twentieth-century music.  Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children  (Chs. XVII and XIX).

11/17:   RESEARCH PROJECTS DUE.  Penderecki, the St. Luke Passion and the Threnody:  for the victims of Hiroshima.  Berio and the Sinfonia (Chs. XVIII and XIX).

11/24:   Minimalism and phase music.  Works of Reilley, Reich.  Phillip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi.  John Adams' Nixon in China. Techniques of minimalist composition (Ch XX).   THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY, 11/27-28

12/1:  Eclecticism and neo-romanticism.  Influence of Jazz and popular music in serious composition.  Leonard Bernstein's Symphony no. 3, "Kaddish," and Mass.  Performance art:  Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave (Ch XIX).  FINAL EXAM DUE, 12/4.

12/9:  FINAL EXAM LISTENING -- 1:15 - 3:45
 

TOPIC:  Due within one month of the first day of class.  Your topic should ideally have some relevance to your major field of study, although this is not a requirement.  A voice major, for instance, may choose to study the vocal works of a particular composer; or perhaps a single major work or group of works, such as opera, mass, or art song.

CONTENT REQUIREMENTS:  All papers must include a title page and bibliography.  The required length will be announced in your course syllabus.  All papers are required to include at least six sources, one of which must be from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.  The main text will be typed, double-spaced.  A generalized summary of form follows:

NOTES: ALL SOURCES, NOT ONLY DIRECT QUOTATIONS, ARE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED IN YOUR PAPER.  In general, each paragraph in a formal research paper should have a note acknowledging its source, unless the information is strictly your own, as in an introduction or summary.  If the information in a paragraph is taken from two or more sources, each must be acknowledged (though only a single source is necessary for each idea).

    To acknowledge the source of your information, cite the author's last name and the page(s) from which the information was taken.  The note will be enclosed in parentheses and will be located immediately following the sentence or paragraph in which the information was presented.  For example, to acknowledge information found in The Classic Style by Charles Rosen, on pp. 250-252, use the following form:

 ...the use of a double ending of the exposition of the first movement of K.491 (Rosen, 250-252).

    If there is more than one source by the same author in your bibliography,  distinguish among the sources by including the date of publication.    For example, if you used four sources in your bibliography by Charles Rosen, and this particular idea was taken from a source published in 1986, use the following form:

 ...of K.491 (Rosen, 1986, 250-252).

DIRECT QUOTATIONS: Direct quotations of more than a line or two should be set off from the text by single spacing and an indentation of five spaces from both right and left margins.  Avoid too heavy a reliance on short quotations; these are almost always better paraphrased.
 

MUSICAL EXAMPLES/ILLUSTRATIONS:  Each example should follow its reference in the text, where practical, and should be numbered, identified as to its source (work, movement, and measure number in the case of a musical example; bibliographic source or model in the case of an illustration).   The identification should precede the example, which shoud be set off by triple spacing.  Be sure to leave adequate room to paste in the example.  For example:
 

 Ex. 1.  Bach, Goldberg Variations, var. 3, mm.9-11.
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ENTRIES:  Entries should be single-spaced, and arranged in alphabetical order.  Cite the author's last name first, then first name (in the case of multiple authors, subsequent names should be arranged with the first name first, then last name).  The first line will not be indented, and all subsequent lines will be indented by five spaces.  You should include in your bibliography all works which are cited directly in your text, and also any source which has been helpful when consulted, whether it was directly cited or not.   Follow the following formats:

A.  For a book:

Staler, Ilona.  Music in the Middle Ages, 2nd. ed., tr. Francesca Scala.  New York:  W.W. Norton & Co.,  1940.

B.  For an article in a reference work:

O'Clytemnestra, Ema.  "Dufay," Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., 10 vols.,  ed. Eric Blom.   London:  St. Martin's Press, Inc.  1958, II, 793-795.

C.  For an article in a periodical:

Quayle, J. Danforth.  "The Castratoe in 18th Century Opera:  an Overview," Modern Music III/1   (Jan. 1926),  3-9.

    Note that books are to be underlined (or italicized, if you are working with a word processor with that capability), while sections of books are placed in quotation marks.  This same principle holds when referring to musical works:  large works are to be underlined, while sections of those works are placed in quotation marks.  For example, a reference to "Eusebius" from Schumann's Carnaval.

DUE DATE:  ALL PAPERS WILL BE DUE WITHOUT EXCEPTION ON THE DATE SPECIFIED IN YOUR SYLLABUS.  Late papers will be penalized by one letter grade per week.