Explorations in Composition

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

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

• good-practice within conventional musical notion; good-practice within un-conventional musical notion; and a greater understanding of how to communicate your ideas in musical notation.
• key aesthetic issues relating to music composition.
• key technical devices and formal procedures that have developed during the second half of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Learning Outcomes

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• implement key technical devices and formal procedures in your own composition
• compose short works
• use standard and non-standard music notation effectively

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

• Isorhythm
• Serialism
• Micro-macro form
• Aleatoric scoring techniques
• Graphic, open-instrumentation and text based scores
• Repetition
• Extended tonal and modal approaches, including polytonality
• Writing for solo instrument
• Writing for a chamber ensemble
• Notation software skills

Examples of specific pieces that will be considered and analysed include:

• Anton Webern, Variations for Piano
• Arvo Part, Collage on B-A-C-H
• Charles Ives, The Cage (1908)
• Darius Milhaud, Botafogo
• Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
• Terry Riley, In C
• Witold Lutoslawski: Symphony No. 3
• Claude Debussy, Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp
• Phronesis, Abraham’s New Gift
• James Saunders, Everybody do this
• Morton Feldman, The Viola In My Life No. 2
• Steve Reich, Eight Lines
• Bernhard Lang, DW16
• Conlon Nancarrow, Study No. 11 for Player Piano
• Jennifer Walshe, THIS IS WHY PEOPLE OD ON PILLS
• John Coltrane, Naima
• Louis Andriessen, Workers Union
• Olivier Messiaen, Liturgie de cristal
• Pierre Boulez, Structures 1a

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include:

• Lectures
• Individual tutorials
• Workshops

Learning activities include:

• Individual study
• Library-based research
• On-line based research

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

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

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

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

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

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

Assessment strategy

For 3rd level students taking this unit, expectations will be higher than those for 2nd level 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, 3rd level 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 Information

Repeat type: Internal & External