Post - Tonal Theory

Once tonality stops being the organizing principle of Western music, you need new tools to explain what holds a piece together — pitch-class sets, twelve-tone rows, octatonic collections, symmetry, centricity — and this course is essentially a toolkit for hearing and arguing about early 20th-century repertoire (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy) on its own terms. Working through Straus, you'll alternate between close analyses of canonical scores and short model compositions in those idioms, plus regular homework, quizzes, and a presentation that applies set-theory methods to a piece you choose. It sits downstream of standard tonal harmony and analysis training, and is the foundation you'll lean on for any later work in 20th- and 21st-century composition, theory, or musicology.