Hugh Hodgson School of Music

Information for Composition Majors

Fall 2007

Composition Seminar is held every Friday, from 11:15 to 12:05 in the Black Box. Attendance is required for all composition students, unless you have a class conflict. Please let your applied instructor know if you have such a conflict. The seminar is student-run and covers a wide variety of topics. Officers for the Student Composers Association this year are:

President Thomas West

Vice-President Brian Graiser

Concert and Recital Attendance: Composition students are expected to attend events associated with the composition area, including all composition recitals and concerts by the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Composition students must attend at least five additional events that include new music on the program. These five events should, ideally, involve different ensembles/performers and represent a wide variety of contemporary music. Students should save programs from attended events and hand these in to their instructors at the end of the semester.

Information about new music events can be found on the website of the Dancz Center for New Music at http://noise.music.uga.edu/. Such information will also be distributed via the ANiMAL email list, to which all composition students are automatically subscribed.

Required Listening is assigned each semester by the three members of the composition faculty. Each instructor will choose a piece, for which a score and recording will be placed on reserve in the Music Library and/or on WebCT. Composition students are to write two-page papers on each piece. Papers are due during the seminar meeting in which each piece is discussed.

The assigned pieces for this semester will be posted on the Dancz Center website (URL above) and on WebCT. A guide to musical terminology and style, which can help you in thinking about and organizing your papers, appears below.

Juries are held at the end of the semester (during finals week) for all students who do not give degree recitals. For the fall semester, this will ordinarily include all juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Sophomore composition majors and music theory majors do not jury in the fall.

A Guide to Musical Terminology

The list below is a collection of terms that you can use to guide your listening and organize your writing about music. The list is by no means exhaustive; however, you’ll find that certain terms will emerge as being most appropriate for the discussion of a particular piece.

I. Melody

• Motives
• Tessitura
• Motion: conjunct, disjunct
• Patterns
• Scales
• Ornamentation
• Character: lyric, dramatic, humorous
• Contrapuntal techniques: imitation, interchange of voices, inversion, retrograde
• Phrase and periods

II. Rhythm

• Meter: regular, irregular, changing
• Tempo: pulse, variety, stability
• Prominence of the rhythmic element: simple, complex, rigid, flexible
• Rhythmic motives: prominence and structural importance

III. Harmony

• Harmonic vocablulary: modal, diatonic, chromatic, atonal, serial, sound-mass
• Intervals/intervallic relationships
• Tension and repose: use of consonance and dissonance, cadence formulas
• Modulatory aspects/key schemes
• Structural significance

IV. Texture

• Structural: monophonic, heterophonic, polyphonic, homophonic
• Surface: phrasing, attacks and releases, nuance.
• Density: number and combinations of instruments; antiphonal arrangements, hall acoustics; use of silence, use of electronic support and modification.

V. Timbre

• Selection, combination, and degree of contrast of instruments and voices
• Exploitation of idiom
• Special effects
• Dynamics: terraced, graduated, implied by instrumentation or range, serial control, aleatoric
• Text influence: exploitation of word sound for mood or texture.

VI. Organization and growth

• Divisions of the overall form
• Methods of achieving unity, variety, extension, continuity, and balance
• Real-time dimensions (timing of individual sections and comparison)
• Programmatic considerations