Courses Offered in Fall 2023 (112AY 1S)

Course Overview and Objectives

This course invites domestic and international scholars and experts to deliver special lectures at the Institute of Music. It aims to enrich students’ knowledge and perspectives in the fields of music composition, performance, research, and other related disciplines, while inspiring multifaceted exploration of music from technical, intellectual, and critical perspectives.

Course Objectives

This course has the following objectives:

1. To strengthen the integrated musical and intellectual abilities of incoming students in the Institute of Music whose background in harmony and musical form may be relatively weak, so that they may better adapt to other courses in the Institute.
2. To provide an integrated introductory course for non-Institute of Music students who already possess a basic level of music theory and wish to study professional courses in music theory, music performance, or music composition in greater depth.
3. To prepare students for the realization of a fully developed musical experience—one that integrates theory, practice, and creation.

This course is divided into two parts:

The first part concerns the basic theory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tonality, including harmony and analysis. Students will be guided to focus on voice-leading and to analyze tonal music from the perspectives of structure and prolongation. The goal is for students to stop viewing tonal music as a series of isolated chordal connections, and instead to investigate its meaning and function, understanding the whole as an organic unity.

The second part concerns style writing. It highlights and provides experience with Western art music and some of its major concepts, using these concepts as a basis for creative realization. These concepts include:

1. Ways of presenting thematic material, such as sentence, period, and others.
2. The idea as the embodiment of totality and its discourse.
3. The indispensable functional roles of structural events in sonata form, including thematic statement, development, contrast, conclusion, and others.
4. Figuration, the prolongation of a single chord, and the prolongation of structural harmonic progressions.
5. Figuration as sign, as style, and as topic.
6. The concepts and techniques of developing variation.

Course Overview

This course presents and simplifies orchestral ensemble and vocal works of various instrumentations from different historical periods through piano keyboard performance. It enables students to understand the basic structural principles of works in different musical styles, become familiar with the use of various clefs and transposing instruments, and further develop the inner ear.

Course Objectives

This course may be regarded as training in advanced musicianship and as the highest test of musical cultivation. Through visual notation, an understanding of theories of musical composition, and practice at the piano keyboard, students will aurally realize the organizational vocabulary and musical expression of Western music. They will come to understand the differences and evolution of styles across historical periods, thereby strengthening the integrated musical abilities of the learner or performer, including sight, touch, hearing, and thought.

This course may also be regarded as a preparatory course for related courses such as Orchestration and Arranging.

Course Overview and Objectives

1. This course primarily aims to help students establish fundamental concepts in music analysis, while integrating basic knowledge of music theory and developing analytical skills.
2. The course is designed on the basis of Western tonal music, with particular emphasis on the analysis of Western tonal music from 1700 to 1900.
3. The course has the following three objectives:
   1. To study the formal structure of musical works and the expansion and prolongation of tonal harmony from both macro- and micro-level perspectives.
   2. To create annotated scores.
   3. To understand the hierarchical concept through which the content of tonal music is expressed, and to learn how to produce formal diagrams for form structure and sketches of reduction analysis for harmonic progression.

In addition to the three learning objectives above, this course places special emphasis on the practical application of the analytical methods and techniques learned in class to the analysis of musical works.

This course offers an overview to Western art music from late Baroque to 1876, the year Wagner’s Ring was premiered. We will incorporate the music history of this period in the larger context of social and cultural developments, including the developments of aesthetics and technology. The goal of this course is twofold. Functioning as a remedial course, it offers graduate music students without sufficient knowledge in the history of Western art music a factual and conceptual grounding. Equally importantly, it approaches music as a cultural phenomenon, partaking and “bouncing back,” as an active force, to what was happening in social reforms, political upheavals, and innovations in technology and industry, including the inventions of music instruments, music devices, as well as well stagecraft, lighting, sound, and space.

Two quizzes focusing on repertoire building and score-reading will take place in mid- and end of the term.

Course Overview and Objectives

This is a remedial course that primarily introduces the development of Western music from 1877 to the modern era. The course content is divided into four main stages:

1. From the invention of the phonograph in 1877 to the collapse of tonality at the end of the nineteenth century.
2. The development and construction of non-tonal music in the early twentieth century.
3. Musical developments since World War II in 1945 and the use of electroacoustic technology.
4. Contemporary musical trends and the integration of developmental contexts in the twenty-first century.

Through this course, students are expected to integrate the complex and interwoven relationships in musical development since the late nineteenth century, and to understand the developmental contexts of music over the past century. This understanding will support students in multiple areas, including the application of compositional techniques, the grasp of performance interpretation, and the study of relationships between musical events and society in musicological research.

Course Overview and Objectives

This is neither a software instruction course nor a course in commercial music arrangement and production.

The course emphasizes: 1. learning by doing and composing; and 2. academic theory, literature reading, aesthetics, and analysis of electronic and computer music works.

1. Students will primarily learn how various digital processing techniques in DAWs, including digital signal processing (DSP), can be applied to sound cutting, editing, collage, and ultimately experimental computer music creation. Technical topics include non-linear cutting and splicing, tape techniques, which have now become important digital sound techniques, sound effects such as filtering and reverb, computer sound synthesis, and spatialization of sound.

   Ultimately, students will experiment with multitrack software, such as Audition, to organize, collage, and create computer music or soundscape works using environmental field recordings as source material. Students will complete assigned exercises, a midterm miniature work, and a final project.

2. Students will listen to and analyze classic works of computer and digital music, and read materials related to digital music technologies, aesthetics, history, and literature.

Through a course design that places equal emphasis on theory, aesthetics, and practical techniques, students will develop skills in computer music composition and reflect on the interdisciplinary integration of technology and musical art as a means of expressing thought and emotion.

Path to Goal

From open ears to happy new ears!

Course Overview and Objectives

Through the performance perspectives and modes of thinking of different instruments, this course strengthens students’ experience in performing duo sonatas through practical work and discussion, while helping them establish a reasonable interpretive style.

At the same time, by engaging with this most concise form of chamber music performance, the course trains students’ understanding and expressive ability in chamber music, bringing them closer to the spirit of chamber music education emphasized by the Performance Division of the Institute of Music.

Students are divided into groups according to instrument type, with instruction provided by one to three instructors.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course provides one-on-one instruction in harpsichord performance. Students will learn modes of expression on the harpsichord that differ from those of the piano. By moving beyond expression based on dynamic contrast, the course helps students understand broader possibilities for communicating musical ideas.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course focuses on performance practice and compositional exercises. Through the interpretation of traditional and contemporary performance techniques, the course explores the possibilities of instrumental sound production and examines how these sounds can be applied in actual composition and performance.

Course content includes:

1. Understanding the principles of instrumental sound production and deriving advanced extended techniques for instruments.
2. Discussing scores and inviting performers to demonstrate, or using related videos as demonstrations.
3. Integrating sound materials by classifying, blending, organizing, and applying them in actual compositional exercises.
4. Engaging in discussion and review after performers read and perform the scores.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course aims to help students understand important musical forms in the history of Western music. Through listening, analysis, and perception, students will explore musical form and structural content, and further connect these forms with historical context and style in order to understand the auditory focus of different musical forms.

The course content is broadly divided into three parts:

1. Understanding the elements that constitute musical form and structure.
2. Learning how to analyze, understand, and perceive important musical forms.
3. Understanding the transformation and significance of form in different historical styles.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course aims to help students explore improvisational vocabularies suited to their own musical practice through different improvisational techniques and concepts. It seeks to develop students’ skills in individual musical improvisation, both in solo performance and ensemble playing, while deepening their understanding and experience of sound and music.

The course takes twentieth-century concepts of sound as its primary stylistic vocabulary for musical improvisation.