Subject Code/Name: Materials and Structures of Music 3 Contact Hours: 1 1/2 hour lecture, 1 1/2 hour studio (aural choir), 1 1/2 hour tute each week.
Assumed Knowledge: M&S1 and 2 (MUSC1602 and MUSC1603)
Assessment: Harmony lecture: In-class test wk 4 (15%), In-class test wk 9 (15%), Composition Assessment (30%).
Aural Tute: Transcription Exercise (10%), In-class aural test (5%), auralia progress (5%).
Aural Choir: Singing group test (5%)
Music Literature: Listening test (15%)
Lecture Recordings? No
Notes/Materials Available: Some exercises, explanations and pieces on Moodle, not a huge amount.
Textbook: The musician’s guide to theory and analysis. It’s the same textbook as last years courses and can also be used for next term. It does explain things pretty well, however, I probably used the the internet and youtube for explanations more than the textbook this term.
Lecturer(s): Lecturer: John Peterson, Tutor: Harrisson Collins
Year & Trimester of completion: 2019,1
Difficulty: 4/5
Overall Rating: 3.5/5
Your Mark/Grade: 67 CR
Comments: I was pretty concerned with this course going into trimesters and having less time, because I felt there was so much content in 13 weeks last term. To counteract this our lectures, studios and tutes were raised from 1hr to 1hr 30min. Due to this, the lectures especially seemed to drag on sometimes and I did get bored towards the end. However, I found this M&S course to be one of the more interesting ones. I felt like everybody was closer to the same pace (compared to previous M&S courses) and nobody was far behind or in front of the class. Most of our assessments were very similar to M&S1 & M&S2 so we already knew what was expected of us and what the format of the assessments would look like.
Lectures:We only had 1/2 a lesson revision of the M&S1 and M&S2 content so if you had forgotten a lot of things it was easy to feel lost in the first couple of weeks. Peterson also picks on people to answer questions which I really hated most of the time (especially when I wasn’t sure of the answers). Throughout lectures, we focussed on Augmented 6th chords, Neapolitan chords, Modulating to unrelated keys, Dominant 9th and Non-Dominant chords. We also looked at analysing different types of music. I found that some lessons I would walk out completely confused because John would have shown us a new concept in music but not explained it enough to fully understand. I needed to do a lot of revision for this part by looking over Youtube, websites and doing extra exercises to make sure I understood the content. I found the two class tests to be difficult but (possibly because I had studied more) not as bad as the tests that I had done last year. The tests were both around an hour long and we had needed to write examples of chords as well as complete some analyses. The composition was 16-20 bars based on a Chopin Nocturne and we had a list of aspects we needed to include.
Tute:I enjoyed the aural tute a lot more than last year. It mainly started with a melodic dictation (which I was terrible at), and then moved into looking at pieces on our listening list. We would listen to parts of the pieces while looking at the historical/significant aspects of the piece. I found that this prepared us really well for the listening test. The listening test went for around 40 minutes and we were given a 2min excerpt of a piece and needed to identify aspects such as the composer, title, movement, date, and significance.
Studio:The aural studio was similar to M&S1. Each week we’d go over a new piece, which mainly consisted of Bach chorales, Rounds, as well as Uni Caritas and O Magnum Mysterium. Our assessment was in small groups of 6, to perform one of the Bach chorales we had gone through in class. I had a really good group so we practised after class for a few weeks and the assessment worked out really well.