New Music Topics and Analysis

Post-tonal music broke the rules tonal analysis was built on, so this course gives you the analytical vocabulary, set theory, serialism, centricity, modality, to actually talk about what composers from Boulez and Stockhausen through Ligeti, Reich, and Lachenmann are doing. The work is reading-and-listening heavy: you trace specific scores across post-war serialism, stochastic music, indeterminacy, spectralism, and minimalism, then demonstrate that you can analyze and argue in writing through two take-home exams. It's a graduate seminar that assumes you already hear tonal structure and want the tools to engage seriously with the music shaping the contemporary concert and composition world.