High School 2009-2010 

Music Theory and History: Counterpoint

To improve fluency in reading, performing, and understanding music by reinforcing basic aural and notational skills, the students in this course will review identifying and writing basic musical symbols, identifying and creating pitches using treble, bass, alto and tenor clefs, the reading, dictation, and performance of rhythms in standard meters, written and aural identification of intervals, and single-line melodic dictation.  We will also study stylistic trends in music history, and 16th century counterpoint, and the exploration of fundamental harmony through aural and written exercises.  Ear-training exercises using singing, clapping and stamping will be used to help train visual-physical responses to written music. 

Music Theory and History: Harmony

Beginning with a review of counterpoint, the main area of study for this course is functional harmony and its structural significance in the music of the Classical period.  In addition, advanced rhythmic study will demand the practice and performance of exercises from Robert Starer's Rhythmic Training, as well as basic polyrhythms.  Written work includes exercises in creating and identifying qualities of chords and will progress to Roman numeral analysis.  Additionally, the students will broaden their understanding of musical styles by researching and writing about selected composers of the month.

Music Theory and History: Choral Performance

The main focus of this course is to solidify the skills that students have learned to date and to lay the foundation necessary for them to be members of a choral ensemble.  The students will learn the foundations of a proper singing technique that they are able to use in performance as well as in their ear training exercises when identifying intervals and building chords.  We will explore a variety of musical masterworks spanning the 17th to the 20th centuries. Each month a selected composer will be studied in depth so that students learn to identify musical characteristics that associate the composer with his specific musical era.  The fundamentals of harmony, melody, rhythm and notation are also covered throughout the year.  

Music Theory and History: Analysis

This course is an overview of music from the late Romantic and Twentieth Centuries with a focus on observing stylistic trends by studying the significant works of the time and reading supporting contemporaneous documents.  A review of counterpoint, functional harmony, and Roman numeral analysis will be followed by a study of sonata-allegro form, theme and variations, and serial techniques.  In addition to learning musical analysis, there will be an emphasis on writing, comparing and contrasting these musical trends and thoughts. This course pre-supposes knowledge of all the clefs and fluent interval identification.