CCOG for MUS 240A Winter 2025
- Course Number:
- MUS 240A
- Course Title:
- Music Composition
- Credit Hours:
- 2
- Lecture Hours:
- 10
- Lecture/Lab Hours:
- 0
- Lab Hours:
- 30
Course Description
Introduces music composition with focus on 20th and 21st century compositional techniques and materials. Includes composition of chamber and concert works with the goal of compiling a portfolio of original works. Prerequisites: MUS 111. Audit available.
Intended Outcomes for the course
Upon successful completion students should be able to:
- Utilize basic contemporary music composition techniques to create basic musical works.
- Compose basic musical works using one’s continually developing personal music language.
- Begin to foster the creative exchange of musical ideas through basic compositional skills.
Course Activities and Design
- Score and part preparation and proofing
- Completing a work from conception to performance
- Improvisation as means of generating of musical ideas
- Analysis of masterworks in variety of genres and styles (esempii classici)
- Transcription and/or arranging of preexisting works
- Balancing unity, variety and form
Outcome Assessment Strategies
- Develop a portfolio of professionally prepared original scores for a variety of instrumental combinations including voice(s).
- Reading sessions of original works by peers, faculty, and semi-professional or professional performers.
- One-on-one instructor/student conferences
- Participation in written and oral peer review and evaluation
- Written quantitative/qualitative examination
Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)
Conventional and contemporary music notation practices
- Variation techniques
- Tonality, modality and atonality
- Intervallic cell-based composition and serialism as alternative means of melodic/harmonic organization
- Basic orchestration and idiomatic instrumental/vocal writing
- Melodic transformation and development technique
- Polyphony – contrapuntal and imitative procedures
- Non-tertian harmony and synthetic melodic materials
- Writing for the voice - selecting and setting text
- Indeterminancy in performance and music composition
- Graphic notation and scores
- Extended instrumental and vocal technique