Music 130: Theory, Literature, and Musicianship for Western Literature II:
Harmony and Form in 19th-century Western Art Music
UC Santa Cruz, Fall Quarter 2019 (registrar class # 21287)
Prerequisites: MUS 30 C & N or equivalent, keyboard proficiency
Ben Leeds Carson
12:00-12:05 PM, MWF — Music Center 136
Office: Music Center 148
Office hours: Mondays 11:00 am -12:00 noon, Thursdays 1:30 - 3:00 PM, and by appointment. (Does your schedule conflict with this list of times? Technically, no—“by appointment” means my office hours include the appointments you make with me. I am flexible.)
Write to me: blc at ucsc dot edu Phone: 9-5581 (I do not check voicemail frequently!)
Musicianship Instructor: Assaf Shatil
General Course Description:
Techniques for the analysis of advanced tonal, chromatic, and post-tonal harmony. Study of larger forms, chromaticism, principles of development, and style elements unique to late romanticism and early modernism.
Course Overview: Students have prepared for this class with a year or more of study in harmony and voice leading in Western Art Music, focusing on the style of Bach and his contemporaries; they have also studied basic phrase structures and forms in later 18th-century music.
In the nineteenth century, with the meteoric rise of a new middle class, the musical language of European music coalesced: musical resources (in harmony and in styles of development, of musical form) were widely shared. The world in about 1820 was radically different than the world Haydn and Beethoven had lived in even just a few decades before: because of this exponentially larger audience—a bourgeois, “literate”, middle-class society—actively seeking opera, chamber and orchestral concerts, and song recitals, and maybe most importantly, printed music on the page, for performance in their own living rooms. In this class, we are studying the craft and language of music that Romantics made for that audience, and the music that they heard. We are trying to understand why their music was, in many ways, the beginning of something popular, commercial, and even global and post-colonial. Here begins a musical world that, although still evolving, we still inhabit. We will learn styles of analysis called “harmonic reduction” and “melodic reduction” in order to uncover the basic elements of their music, and we will also learn to think critically about that analytical approach.
Composers like Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Clara and Robert Schumann, Josephine Lang, Louise Reichart, and Frederic Chopin had one foot in the prior world. Their forms, rhythms, and cadences extended the schema of Mozart, Haydn, and the Bach family. But they had another foot in a world that Carl Dahlhaus (in one of our course readings) called “a cult of genius”, and we can observe the impact of that cult not only on their artistic goals, but on basic elements of their harmonic progressions. Soon after, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner began to think of themselves as what E.T.A. Hoffman termed “Romantics”, and as progressives. What did that mean for their music? What did a musical “moment” become to Robert Schumann, that it could not have been to a composer in the 18th century? What could be done with a musical ‘motif’, or character, that couldn’t happen for Monteverdi or Mozart? And what became of their public—did popular audiences follow them down these florid paths, or invent completely different paths of their own?
To learn about the expanding and modern concept of Western music, we’re going to make it—you’ll develop your own literacy in ways that resemble those of 19th-century music consumers, and you’ll learn tools of description that will help us think critically about the music of the composers above, and the later music of Bizet, Gounod, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mahler, Ravel, Schoenberg, Villa-Lobos, William Grant Still, Scott Joplin, and Duke Ellington.
Objectives:
1. To develop literacy in tonal music and advanced techniques for tonal analysis.
2. To clarify and distinguish harmonic and formal features of nineteenth-century music.
3. To strengthen and advance performance, listening, and interpretative skills that relate to Western Art Music.
Required Texts:
Agawu, Kofi. “How We Got out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again,” in Music Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 2/3 (Jul. - Oct., 2004), pp. 267-286.
Cadwallader, Allen and David Gagne. Analysis of Tonal Music. London: Oxford U Press, 1997.
Stefan Kostka and Dorothy Payne. Tonal Harmony (Sixth Edition). New York: McGraw Hill, 2009.
Charles Burkhart and William Rothstein. Anthology for Musical Analysis. (Sixth Edition.) New York: Thomson/Schirmer, 2007.
Robert W. Ottman and Nancy Rogers. Music for Sight Singing. (Eighth Edition.) New York: Prentice Hall, 2010
Yang, Mina. “East Meets West in the Concert Hall: Asians and Classical Music in the Century of Imperialism, Post-Colonialism, and Multiculturalism.” Asian Music, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Winter - Spring, 2007), pp. 1-30.
You will use horizontal staves for most of your analytical work in this course.
Recommended Texts [excerpts within fair-use limits will be made available]:
Allen Cadwallader and David Gagne. Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach. London: Oxford U Press, 1997.
Carl Dahlhaus. From Romanticism to Modernism. Translated by Mary Whitall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Miscellany:
1. Being there: Regardless of any reason for absence, students are responsible for completing whatever work they have missed when they are gone. Please let me know about absences that result from health conditions, family emergencies, or major transportation accidents, and so on. However, in any case of absence, be sure to check with a classmate for information about what was discussed on that day, and get a clear sense of all new assignments. If you can’t get that information from a classmate, please contact me via email. More than five unexcused absences from class and lab combined, or three unexcused absences from lab, will result in a grade of NP. See “Course Credit and Grading” (below) for more details.
2. Performance anxiety: In class, we’ll work on your skills and your knowledge in a direct and conversational way. But I’m never interested in getting you to prove anything on the spot. You will find that if you can’t get the answer right away, I’ll take lead the conversation differently so the class will work on it together. I hope you’ll find I’m pretty good at diffusing any public sense of student deficiency.
3. Deadlines: Please complete your homework in clear hand-written notation, with a pencil, and get them in on time! Late assignments will be accepted but they will not receive full credit and I cannot guarantee that I will give them thorough comments. This can be a problem because I expect to see improvement from one assignment to the next, so one late assignment can affect your later grades if you don’t take the initiative to get my informal comments on your progress, and keep the “conversation” going.
4. Communication: I respond to most email, IM, and text-messaging within 12 hours or so, to answer important questions about course material, the assignments and so on. I love getting emails with questions about music and the actual content of the course. I also want to hear from you if you’re having any trouble getting the concepts, getting the homework in, or getting to class. But please limit the use of email for excuses about already-past absences of unfinished assignments – there’s no hurry to give me that information so it’s better to focus on your work and think about what you need to do for the next class.
Course Credit and Grading:
Weekly exercises, including composition and analysis: 18%
Quizzes: 10%
Mid-term exam: 18%
Analysis Presentation: 15%
Final Exam: 12%
Musicianship Lab: 27%*
*A grade of 67% or less in the combined scores of musicianship “lab midterm” and “lab final” (dates TBA) will result in a credit of zero percent under this heading. You must also pass the musicianship portion of the course in order to pass the course as a whole, even if your coursework is excellent.
More about grading:
Grades reflect your accomplishments. They don’t reflect your intentions, your sincerity, or my sense of your potential. That might seem cold or harsh, but if you think about it, it’s actually really weird that we expect teachers to judge those things. If grades reflect how earnest you are, or how deserving, that means I have to pretend I’m qualified to judge you as a person. I hope you’ll be comforted to know that a C+ doesn’t mean I’m annoyed at you, and an A+ doesn’t mean I’m your newest fan. It’s not personal. And hey, for all I know, C+ was all you had time to give that week! Although I really want you to aim for A work, I’m also not going to judge you when you seem to aim lower—there are other things in life besides this course.
Also: Please don’t fume over your grade. Ask me about it. I’ll be happy that you want to understand better, and I won’t be defensive. It really helps me do a better job of teaching if you try to build a conversation around my written feedback about your work.
Academic Integrity and Honesty:
Be careful to distinguish borrowed ideas, borrowed music, and borrowed words, from your own. Academic integrity in the arts is not about originality, it’s about transparency: when you use something that precedes you, something that you found rather than something you made or initiated, your integrity depends on clearly how your audience, and your colleagues, understand the borrowing. In an orchestration class, you’ll be borrowing most of the time. But if you have integrity, you won’t pretend to have come up with any ideas (melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or orchestrational) that you didn’t come up with.
Plagiarism is the misuse of others’ material, representing someone else’s thoughts or observations as your own. Anyone who attempts to take credit for the work of others, or tries to use work that is not theirs to bolster their evaluation, will be subject to disciplinary action, which may include failing the class and/or a notation on your academic record, and in serious cases or in case of a repeat offense, suspension of expulsion. When in doubt, ask.
Students with Learning Differences:
If you qualify for classroom accommodations because of a learning difference, please submit your Accommodation Authorization Letter from the Disability Resource Center (DRC) to your core teacher, preferably within the first two weeks of the quarter. Contact DRC by phone at 831-459-2089, or by email at drc@ucsc.edu for more information.
Additional Information:
Land Acknowledgment
Title IX and CARE
Difficult Conversations
Report and Incident of Hate or Bias
Student Services