Courses Offered in Fall 2026 (115AY 1S)

Course Objectives

1. To strengthen the integrated musical-intellectual abilities of incoming graduate students in the Institute of Music who may have a weaker background in harmony and form, so that they may better adapt to other courses in the program.
2. To provide an integrated introductory course for non-Institute of Music students who already possess a basic foundation in music theory and wish to further study professional courses in music theory, music performance, and music composition.
3. To prepare students for the realization of a fully developed musical experience—that is, the integration of theory, practice, and creation.

Course Structure

This course is divided into two parts.

The first part focuses on the basic theories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tonality, including harmony and analysis. Students will be guided to emphasize voice-leading, analyzing tonal works from the perspectives of structure and prolongation. The goal is for students to no longer view tonal music as a series of isolated chordal connections, but rather to explore its meaning and function, understanding the whole as an organic unity.

The second part focuses on style writing, with the aim of highlighting and experiencing Western art music and some of its major concepts, and of applying these concepts in creative practice. These concepts include:

1. Modes of thematic presentation: sentence, period, and others.
2. The idea as the embodiment of totality and its discourse.
3. The functional roles of essential structural events in sonata form, such as thematic statement, development, contrast, and conclusion.
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.