Music History is a survey of musical forms and styles. The class is an elective course open to students in grades 11 and 12, and is designed to develop techniques of critical listening through a guided study of exemplary works of the main stylistic periods.
Following a chapter which introduces / reviews the elements of music such as pitch, dynamics, tone color, rhythm, notation, texture, and form, the course presents a chronological survey of the history of music. This history of western music is divided into the following stylistic periods:
The Middle Ages (450 -1450) including Gregorian chant, secular music, the development of polyphony, and the "Ars Nova". (Composers such as Hildegard of Bingen, Leonin, Perotin, Landini, and Machaut are introduced.)
The Renaissance (1450 -1600) including imitative counterpoint, word painting, the mass, motet, and madrigal, and the Venetian school. (Composers such as Josquin, Palestrina, Weelkes, Morley, Dowland, and Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli are introduced.)
The Baroque (1600 -1750) including terraced dynamics, basso continuo, the concerto grosso and ritornello form, the fugue, opera, the chorale and church cantata, and oratorio. (Composers such as Monteverdi, Purcell, Corelli, Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel are studied.)
The Classical Period (1750 -1820) including sonata form, theme and variations, minuet and trio, rondo, the classical symphony, the classical concerto, and chamber music. (Composers such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are studied.)
The Romantic Period (1820 -1900) including the art song, program music, nationalism and exoticism, and chromatic harmony. (Composers such as Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Smetana, Dvorak, Brahms, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and Mahler are studied.)
The Twentieth Century (1900 - 2000) including impressionism, expressionism, polytonality, atonality, polyrhythm, primitivism, serialism, chance music, minimalism, electronic music, and microtonal music. (Composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartok, Ives, Gershwin, and Copland are studied along with such contemporary composers as Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen, Reich, Glass, Babbitt, Penderecki, Crumb, Carter, Zwilich, and Harvey.)
The course concludes with brief surveys of jazz, musical theatre, and rock, as well as the music of non-western cultures including sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Japan.
Students are tested at the end of each chapter, but are also graded on class participation and both written and oral reports. Students are encouraged to attend concerts on campus and in Austin.
The text used is Roger Kamien's Music - An Appreciation (6th ed.) McGraw-Hill, 1996. This is supplemented by an 8-CD set as well as many scores and CDs provided by the instructor. Additional information and research materials can be found by following the links provided on Mr. Wilkinson's web-site at http://mail.sss.austin.tx.us.