MUS10210 Musicianship

Academic Year 2022/2023

This module covers the rudiments of music, including writing and reading scores, and the fundamentals of music theory (melody, rhythm, tonality, key, intervals, etc.). Basic concepts in writing and analyzing harmony are introduced (including degrees of the scale and Roman numeral notation). These fundamentals are reinforced and developed through aural analysis, which focuses on listening skills, score-reading and the basics of musical genres (instrumentation, texture, timbre, etc.).

At the end of the course, students should be able to write and read music fluently, to listen intelligently to recordings whilst following a score, and to identify basic technical features in music of different styles.

This module caters for students who have limited knowledge of music theory and common practice music notation, and it is designed to get students up to the level they need to be at to take Music Theory 1 in the second trimester. You SHOULD take this module if you need to learn or revise any of the following material: the notation of pitch and rhythm, rhythmic duration and rests, simple and compound meters and anacrusis; treble, bass and C clefs, major and minor scales, major and minor key signatures and circle of fifths, relative and parallel keys; simple and compound intervals and inversions of intervals, quality of intervals, consonance and dissonance; triads and seventh chord construction, quality and inversions; Roman numeral notation (including inversions).

If you have a strong grasp of the above skills, you can instead opt to take MUS10020 Listening to Music instead of this module.