Courses Offered in Spring 2024 (112AY 2S)

Course Overview and Objectives

The goal of “Analysis of Twentieth-Century Music” is to help students understand the diverse styles of twentieth-century Western music and become familiar with twentieth-century music theory and analytical techniques.

This course places particular emphasis on music from the first half of the twentieth century, before 1945. The overall course design aims to cultivate students’ sensitivity to twentieth-century music, enable them to analyze its various styles and techniques, reflect on the purpose of analysis, and learn how to produce meaningful analytical interpretations.

Accordingly, this course in music analysis has two objectives:

1. To observe and approach the major material dimensions within the structure of twentieth-century music.
2. To practice analytical methods and techniques for twentieth-century music.

The first objective primarily helps students correctly identify the main materials and structures used in a twentieth-century musical work. The second objective then enables students, through practical exercises, to learn different analytical methods and apply them appropriately to the analysis of twentieth-century works.

The course content is divided into five units:

1. Impressionist music and Stravinsky before 1920.
2. Neoclassicism.
3. The music of Bartók.
4. Serial Music I, 1920–1945, with emphasis on basic set theory.
5. Serial Music II, with emphasis on basic twelve-tone music.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course is conducted in the form of special topics, selecting composers for the study of their styles and compositional techniques. This semester uses selected works by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) and Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) as research materials, exploring their styles and techniques while guiding students to apply these ideas to composition and performance interpretation.

The course includes processes such as listening, score reading, observation, discussion, hypothesis, and verification. Some course content will also include video interviews with composers and readings of related articles. The goal is to guide students in understanding representative composers from different periods and styles through multifaceted observation and discussion of their works, and to further analyze their aesthetic concepts and practical technical applications in composition.

Students who have previously taken “Special Topics in Composers: Ligeti & Crumb” in the second semester of the 2022 Academic Year may still take this course.