Composition Workshop

Learning Outcomes

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• use music notation effectively to communicate your ideas
• implement key technical devices and formal procedures in your own composition
• compose short works for small forces

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• important aesthetic issues relating to music composition
• key technical devices and formal procedures that have developed during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• present scores clearly with attention to detail and with knowledge of notationl good-practice

A series of topics will be presented over the semester with each exploring compositional approaches. Topics that may be explored include:

• Approaches to musical form
• Creating and working with musical materials
• Composition with constraints
• Polymetre
• Metric modulation
• Rhythmic operations
• Extended tonality and modality
• Writing for chamber ensemble

Examples of specific pieces that may be studied include:

• Django Bates, 'New York New York'
• Bjork, 'Features Creatures'
• Claude Debussy, 'Voiles'
• Dirty Projectors, 'I Feel Energy'
• Kraftwerk, 'Spacelab'
• György Ligeti, 'Six Bagatelles'
• Sky Macklay, 'Many Many Cadences'
• Olivier Messiaen, 'Quartet for the End of Time'
• Joni Mitchell, 'Song to a Seagull'
• Radiohead, 'Pyramid Song'
• Simon Steen Andersen, 'String Study No. 1'
• Igor Stravinsky, 'Petrushka'
• Edgar Varese, 'Ionisation'

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include:

• Lectures
• Group and individual tutorials
• Rehearsals and workshops

Learning activities include:

• Individual study
• Between session listening/analysis tasks
• Library-based research
• On-line based research
• Rehearsals and workshops

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

David Cope (1977). New Music Composition. New York: Schirmer.

Arnold Schoenberg (1967). Fundamentals of musical composition. Faber.

Arnold Whittall (1999). Musical composition in the twentieth century: Music since the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press.

Oliver Messiaen (1956). The Technique of my musical language. Leduc.

Larry Austin (1989). Learning to compose: modes, materials and models of musical invention. Dubuque: Wm. Brown.

Assessment strategy

For level 6 students taking this unit, expectations will be higher than those for level 5 students, and the assessment criteria will be accordingly stricter. In particular:

• Assignments should demonstrate a broader degree of focus and detail; control over material; formal sophistication; and reflect a more mature response to the set compositional task.
• For score based work, optimal standards are required in terms of the physical appearance of work and following the standards of good-practice musical notation.
• For written work, optimal standards of presentation are required in terms of spelling, punctuation, and grammar; sophistication of vocabulary; provision of footnotes; inclusion of full bibliographic and related details; physical appearance of work, etc.

In short, level 6 students should aspire at all times to the highest possible levels of undergraduate work.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External