78212 - Theories and Techniques of Musical Composition (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, the students will have learned some strategies of musical analysis useful to grasp the relationships between a compositional practice of the modern repertory (from 18^th to 20^th century) and their implicit or explicit underlying theories. They will find out some aspects, concerning one or more parameters, of the generative grammar of a musical repertory, and therefore will improve their attitude in recognizing and criticizing its compositinal outcomes. They will increase their knowledge of the history and the systematic of the musical styles.

Course contents

Syntactic and formal functions in chamber instrumental music between the 19^th and early 20^th centuries

Since the musical discourse has a grammar, it is therefore provided with specific morphosyntactic and rhetoric functions. The course will investigate how these functions have been carried, in some exemplary cases, by the instrumental tradition of the modern era, and by either the theory of form or some recent acquisitions of music analysis.

Readings/Bibliography

Berry, Wallace, Form in Music, Prentice Gall, Englewood Cliffs 1986;

Borio, Gianmario, La concezione dialettica della forma musicale da Adolf Bernhard Marx a Erwin Ratz. Abbozzo di un decorso storico, in: Stefano La Via e Roger Parker (ed. by), Pensieri per un maestro. Studi in onore di Pierluigi Petrobelli, EdT, Torino 2002, pp. 361-386;

Caplin, William, What are Formal Functions?, in: W. Caplin, J. Hepokoski, J. Webster, Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre. Three methodological Reflections, Leuven Univesity Press, Leuven 2010, pp. 21-40;

Dahlhaus, Carl, Frase e periodo. Per una teoria della sintassi musicale, “Musica/Realtà”, n. 109, 2016, pp. 81-99 (to be integrated with § 5 of the french version Phrase et période. Contribution à une théorie de la syntaxe musicale, “Analyse musicale”, 13/4, 1988, pp. 37-44), or of the original german version: Satz und Periode. Zur Theorie der musikalischen Syntax, "Zeitschrift für Musiktheorie", 9/2, 1978, pp. 16-26);

Kuhn, Clemens, Forme (§ 9, pp. 239-263, of: Il linguaggio delle forme nella musica occidentale, Unicopli, Milano 1987);

Mastropasqua, Mauro, Koch, i romantici e Herder (§ 5, pp. 87-108, of --, Logica musicale. Storia di un'idea, Bononia University Press, Bologna 2011);

--, Abbozzo di un nuovo sistema teorico-analitico dell'armonia tonale, in conformità alle consuetudini stilistiche di Bach (in this website, at the link Materiale didattico in the page of Teoria musicale, a.a. 2015-16). This essay is necessary for the harmonic analysis implications of the written test - see forward.

Useful for preliminary notions: Hodeir, André, Dizionario delle forme musicali, Pagano, Napoli 1989 (or later editions); items in Harvard Dictionary of Music (1974 or a later edition) on the subject, beginning from "Binary and ternary Form”.

Assessment methods

(1) Written test. Analysis of syntactic and formal functions (according to the methodology shown at lesson), of the main harmonic articulations and of the tonal plan of a piece assigned by the teacher the same day of the exam. Allowed time for the written test: 3 hours.

(2) Oral test. Discussion of the analysis above mentioned; questions about the contents of the essays in bibliography.

Office hours

See the website of Mauro Mastropasqua