Undergraduate Catalogue of Courses 2013/2014
MUSIC
Course Co-ordinator: Dr F Jurgensen
Pre-requisite(s): Entry to an honours programme in music or another discipline, or entry to BMus designated degree
Note(s): Course is not available to students studying Physics
Different facets of sound, such as frequency, amplitude, wave transmission and interaction will be studied through the lens of specific musical focus questions, for example: "why do choirs often go flat?" or "how many oboes are as loud as one trumpet?"
2 one-hour lectures per week
1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%); portfolio of assignments (50%)
Resit: Students resit any failed assignment(s) and/or the two-hour written examination.
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
Written feedback will be provided for each of the assignments making up the folio.
PLEASE NOTE: Resit: (for Honours students only): Candidates achieving a CAS mark of 6-8 may be awarded compensatory level 1 credit. Candidates achieving a CAS mark of less than 6 will be required to submit themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.
Course Co-ordinator: tbc
Pre-requisite(s): Entry to final year of BMus (Music and Communities) honours programme
The course will consist of two distinct elements:
- Practical Musicianship Skills - These workshops will build on those first encountered in the level 3 course of the same name and will develop the base-line skills (keyboard, percussion, singing, rehearsing and directing, guitar and improvisation) required by students to work as musicians engaging with a variety of community groups.
Ensemble Development Students will be required to set up an ensemble (or continue working with one that they have already set up) and work with this group throughout the session. They will create work for this group using their composition and improvisation skills in preparation for the improvisation element of the final recital. The ensembles will be entirely student-led with only minimal intervention from academic staff and students will be required to undertake a variety of peer-assessment techniques during this part of the course.
Practical Musicianship Skills - 1 two-hour session per week Ensemble Development - 1 thirty-min session per week
1st Attempt: 20 minute recital/presentation/improvisation using a variety of instruments (100%)
Resit: 20 minute recital/presentation/improvisation using a variety of instruments (100%) (revisited)
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
Oral feedback will be provided by the lecturer on draft work during the year. Written feedback will be provided on report forms following submission of the assessment.
Course Co-ordinator: Dr F Jurgensen
Pre-requisite(s): Entry to fourth year of an honours programme in Music
Note(s): This course does not run every year
This course is intended both for those interested in Renaissance music and for composition students who wish to explore the many possibilities of musical invention within a very controlled compositional environment. To acquire the basic tools of Renaissance composition, students progress through species counterpoint exercises in two and three voices. Through more advanced exercises in motivic placement, canon (with and without cantus firmus), invertible counterpoint, and the fundamentals of improvised counterpoint, students learn to structure a complete composition, culminating in a motet for three voices. In addition, contemporaneous works are studied through analysis of compositions and investigation of treatises.
1 two-hour seminar per week
1st Attempt: Portfolio of compositions (100%)
Resit: Portfolio of compositions and exercises (100%).
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
Feedback will be provided on individual elements comprising the portfolio as the course progresses to allow students to learn from their mistakes. It will take the form of annotations to the work. The folio itself will be assessed at the end of the course, and a report written on it.
Course Co-ordinator: Dr E Campbell
Pre-requisite(s): Entry to year 4 of an honours programme in Music
In the mid-twentieth century, it seemed that opera was a moribund art form, surviving at best on the back of a canon of great historical works. While its future prospects looked bleak, the composition of over 150 new operas in the period between 1978 and 2003 marked a perhaps unexpected renaissance of the genre in a number of new forms.
This course will engage students in studying the factors which led to the resurgence of operatic/music theatre composition in Europe. A number of works by composers from France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom will be studied from a number of points of view (analysis of musical scores, libretti, vocal style, stage design, recordings etc.)
Students will be expected to view and listen to a number of operas/music theatre pieces, to analyse aspects of scores and libretti and to think critically about the cultural significance of this late flowering of these important genres. Students will give a number of short presentations throughout the course.
12 two-hour seminars
1st Attempt: Essay of 3,000 words (100%)
Resit: Students resit any failed elements of assessment
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
Students will give a number of short presentations during the course
Oral feedback during seminars (see formative assessment above)
Written feedback on essay in the form of annotations to the script and a report form
Course Co-ordinator: Dr M Young
Pre-requisite(s): Entry to fourth year of an honours programme in Music
Note(s): This course does not run every year: please contact Department of Music for up-to-date information.
Practical, studio-based classes will provide a technical overview of software applications ProTools, Audiosculpt and Max/MSP, and of sound recording techniques and the microphone. Running concurrently, seminar-based classes will provide an historical overview of electroacoustic music that utilizes the voice as sound object. The theme of each seminar, focused each week around a different aspect of the voice and technology, will provide the theoretical, philosophical, and aesthetic basis for practical applications. Drawing from readings, close analysis and listening of key electro-vocal works from the twentieth century and beyond, we will assess particular cultural and aesthetic issues that concern the mediated voice in recorded sound. The course will probe the role and influence of technology in compositions that involve the voice and technology, particularly looking at the way the voice is rendered, represented or transposed through the electronic medium.
Topics include the microphone and recording technology, sound recording technology and its implications for voice recording, early vocal immortalizations onto the phonograph, the theremin, musique concrte, the looped voice, the mechanical voice, the synthesized voice, the fictional robotic voice, human beat-boxes, the interactive voice, sampling the voice and plunderphonics, the electroacoustic voice, and lastly the spoken narrative in contemporary music composition.
1 two-hour seminar per week
1 two-hour studio class per week
1st Attempt: Written journal: (25%) In-class participation: (10%) Mid-term composition project: (25%) Final compositional project: (40%)
Resit: Written journal: (25%)
Composition Project: (75%)
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
Oral feedback during studion work
Written feedback on compositions and journal using report forms.
Course Co-ordinator: Dr J Cameron
Pre-requisite(s): Entry to the fourth year of an honours programme in Music
This course begins by introducing students to the principles of editing baroque music, taking as its starting point Vivaldi's well known setting of the Gloria, RV 589. These principles are then extended to the editing of Gloria settings by Vvialdi's contemporary, Ruggieri, after which an issue of plagiarism is identified and Vivaldi's borrowings from Riggieri explored in greater detail.
The music is analysed in terms of its 'word plainting' and musical rhetoric. The course goes on to cover more advanced principles of editing, including the presentation of material in critical commentaries. General aesthetic and stylistic consideration is given to Vivaldi's use of material by Ruggieri. Throughout the course students engage with primary source material in the preparation of their own editions of music.
1 two-hour seminar per week
1st Attempt: Essay of 2,500 words (100%)
Resit: Students resit any failed assessment
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
Regular (mostly weekly) editing and analytical exercises
Oral feedback will be provided on formative assessment, often in the context of seminars.
Written feedback will be given on the edition and essay/analysis in the form of annotations to scripts and report form