Music Theory and Compositional Practices

Recommended Prerequisites

Sound music training. Good levels of both the Portuguese and English (mainly reading) languages.

Teaching Methods

Classes are organized to encourage the students’ active involvement in learning, fostering student teacher interaction.

The theoretical exposition will be illustrated with musical examples and documentation.

Presentation and discussion of work done by students on topics or texts previously indicated.

Learning Outcomes

General objectives:
Encourage and foster research, to develop critical faculties, to understand the main aspects of Music Theory.
Specific objectives:
• Understand the main aspects of music theory - speculative, regulative and analytical;
• Understand the musical theory of the fourteenth century and early fifteenth century;
• Understand music theory and musical thought after 1450 and its main theoretical and treated;
• Understand the main compositional techniques in the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

- Retrospective of the main aspects of music  theory and compositional practice: the speculative tradition, regulative and analytical;

- Music theory in the fourteenth century and early fifteenth century;

- Theory of music and musical thought after 1450, leading theorists and treaties;

- Main compositional techniques in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Head Lecturer(s)

José António Pereira Nunes Abreu

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Weekly tasks : 100.0%

Bibliography

Berger, Anna Maria Busse, Medieval music and the art of memory, University of California Press, 2005.

Christensen, Thomas, ed., The Cambridge history of western music theory, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Judd, Cristle Collins, ed., Tonal structures in early music, Garland, 1998.

Judd, Cristle Collins, Reading Renaissance Music Theory. Hearing with the Eyes, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Owens, Jessie Ann, Composers at work – The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600.

Palisca, ClaudeV., Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, Yale Universitu Press, 1985

Wiering, Frans, The Language of the Modes: Studies in the History of Polyphonic Music, New York and London, Routledge, 2001.

Strohm, Reinhard and Blackburn, Bonnie, (ed.), Music as Concept and Practice in the late Middle Ages, The New Oxford History of Music, Vol. III. 1, Oxford University Press, 2001.