Listening, Analysis and Imagination

Recommended Prerequisites

Not applicable.

Teaching Methods

The course work articulates moments of listening to humanly organized sound patterns (music and sound art), moments of interpretation and debate about them, including the analysis of graphic translations of sound (scores, diagrams, sonograms) and readings (debated in class) of pedagogical and critical texts that inform the activity of musical comprehension and interpretation.

Learning Outcomes

The objectives of the course are (1) to cultivate conscious and acute hearing (listening); (2) to develop discursive modalities about the listener's experience of music and sound (analysis), involving associative (memory), syntactic (expectation) and semantic (meaning) capacities; and (3) exercise the potential for conceptualization (formal, bodily, cultural) of sound-affective phenomena (imagination), including their relationships with language, image and history. After completing the uc, the student should be able to: (1) auraly discriminate a variety of sound-musical parameters, including textures, registers, timbres, and psycho-acoustic patterns such as voice, motif, melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, etc.; (2) frame attentive hearing (enriched by cultural factors) in a descriptive and explanatory analytical discourse; and (3) understand and demonstrate categories and representations of music/sound, mediated by the relationship with time, body, emotion and movement.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

1. Parameterized listening: timbre, register, texture.

2. Listening in the body: periodicity (metric), non-periodicity, character (rhythm).

3. Spatial listening: horizontal, vertical and oblique (melody, harmony, counterpoint).

4. Analysis of continuity-discontinuity in music and sound: phrase articulation, section, form.

5. Analysis of tension and distension in music: consonance-dissonance, cadence, formal arch.

6. Associative, syntactic and semantic analysis: theme-motive, expectation, meaning.

7. Imagination of temporality: conceptualization of directed, non-directed and ecstatic movement.

8. Imagination of musical grammar: categorization, formal models, musical systems and theory.

9. Imagination of the body and affection in music: embodiment, metaphor, mapping between domains (image, language).

10. Listening, analysis and imagination in the history of music theory.

11. Listening, analysis and imagination in culture and history.

Head Lecturer(s)

José António Oliveira Martins

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Participation: 20.0%
Research work: 40.0%
Resolution Problems: 40.0%

Bibliography

BERNSTEIN, L. 1971. O Mundo da Música. Lisboa: Livros do Brasil.

CONE, E.T. 1968. Musical Form and Musical Performance. NY: Norton.

COHN, R. 2012. Audacious Euphony. NY: OUP.

DEBELLIS, M. 1995. Music and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

GRACYK, T. 2007. Listening to Popular Music. Ann Arbor: U Michigan Press.

GRIMSHAW-AAGAARD, M, et. al., eds. 2019, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination. NY: Oxford UP.

LAITZ, S. 2015. The Complete Musician: An Integrated Approach to Theory, Analysis and Listening, 4th ed. NY: OUP.

SESSIONS, R. 1974. The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP.

KOZAK, M. 2020. Enacting Musical Time. OUP

STRAUS, S. 2012. Elements of Music, 3rd ed. NY: Pearson.

WRIGHT, C. 2012. The Essential Listening to Music. NY: Schirmer Cengage Learning.

TYMOCZKO, D. 2011. A Geometry of Music. NY: OUP.

ZBIKOWSKI, L. 2017. Foundations of Musical Grammar. NY: OUP.