Courses Offered in Spring 2026 (114AY 2S)

Course Overview and Objectives

This course has two objectives:

1. To strengthen the integrated musical and intellectual abilities of incoming students whose background in harmony and musical form may be relatively weak, so that they may better adapt to other courses in the Institute of Music.
2. 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 and Objectives

This course aims to help students explore improvisational vocabularies suited to their own artistic voice through various improvisational techniques and concepts. It develops students’ skills in solo and ensemble musical improvisation, while deepening their understanding and experience of sound and music.

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

Course Overview and Objectives

This course focuses on the orchestration techniques of modern composers. Through three main approaches—a brief introduction to orchestral instrumentation and orchestration, the observation and reading of score excerpts, and practical orchestration performance exercises—the course builds the orchestration and orchestral knowledge and concepts required of graduate students.

The first two weeks begin with an overview of orchestral instrumentation and orchestration, followed by extensive study and observation of composers’ scores. Midterm and final assignments include orchestration writing exercises for students in the Composition Division, observations on performance interpretation for students in the Performance Division, and analytical observation reports for students in the Musicology Division. These assignments are designed to help students quickly develop the observational, interpretive, and sound-blending perspectives central to orchestration, while also providing different modes of presentation at the midterm and final stages so that students may expand their learning according to their own fields.

The course is conducted in lecture format. Each week, a selected excerpt from one work is used to explore its compositional approach to orchestration. In addition to allowing composition students to examine a large number of orchestration cases within a short period of time, the course also helps performance students better understand the relationships among parts in ensemble playing.

The score examples discussed in class begin with the basic use of strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion, and extend to mixed applications in small chamber music, large chamber music, and orchestral works. The repertoire studied covers orchestration styles from the Classical period to the modern era.

The course emphasizes guiding students to read a substantial body of existing score literature in order to strengthen their experience. Given the relatively limited number of class hours, students are expected to prepare thoroughly before class. For the midterm and final presentations, students in the Performance Division will perform short orchestration works created by students in the Composition Division, and all participants will offer feedback. This process is intended to stimulate students’ awareness of problems they may encounter in practice and to develop their ability to think independently and solve problems.