Week 1: Music Theory and Analysis
Music theory has existed for centuries. Though as a professional discipline in the United States music theory is only about 50 years old. In our seminar meet...
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2015
Week 2: (Phrase) Rhythm and Meter
Concentrating primarily on the most important strands of rhythmic and metric theory and analysis, this week also focuses on the music of Haydn and Mozart—-w...
Week 3: Classical Form
This week we continue our study of theoretical approaches to “Classical” music through the lens of musical form–and specifically sonata form. In the last fif...
Week 4: Schema Theory
Week 5: Transformation Theory
This is the first in set of three weeks devoted to “Transformation theory,” a discipline that has its origins in the writings of David Lewin and which has ha...
Week 6: (Post-)Neo-Riemannian Theory
Like so many theoretical ideas, the field of “neo-Riemannian theory” has its origins in David Lewin’s transformation theory. (Ironically, perhaps more than i...
Week 7: Voice-Leading (Spaces)
Robert D. Morris, “Voice-Leading Spaces,” Music Theory Spectrum 20/2 (1998): 175– 208. Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in th...
Week 8: Literary Theory
Gregory Karl, “Structuralism and Musical Plot,” Music Theory Spectrum 19/1 (1997): 13–34. Byron Almén, “Narrative Archetypes: A Critique, Theory, and Metho...
Week 9: Embodiment I—Metaphor, Disability
Janna Saslaw, “Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music,” Journal of Music Theory 40/2 (1996):...
Week 10: Embodiment II—Gender, Sexuality
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 3–34. Pieter C. van den Toorn, “Politics,...
Week 11: Cognition
David Huron, “Tone and Voice: A Derivation of the Rules of Voice-Leading from Perceptual Principles,” Music Perception 19/1 (2001): 1-64. David Temperley, T...
Week 12: Approaches to Popular Music
Walter Everett, “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems,” Music Theory Online 10/4 (2004). Trevor de Clerq, “Sections and Successions in Successful Songs,” Ph...
2014
Week 13: Corpus Studies
David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), Chapters 7 and 13. Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of...