Exam review guide for 20th century music
This list is intended to guide you to the essential terminology for understanding the musical examples in class. It is not a "formula" for preparing for the test. Learning the terms on this list is no substitute for a broad understanding of the kind that can only be acquired by doing the assigned reading and listening in their entirety.
Exam 1: All material to the horizontal line below.
- Listening skills
- rhythm and meter
- scale
- major and minor
- form in popular songs
- Movements
- Modernism
- Romanticism
- Expressionism
- Primitivism
- Cubism
- Neoclassicism
- Second Viennese School
- Concepts
- abstraction
- "art for art's sake"
- tonality and atonality
- dissonance and consonance
- number of simultaneous pitches sounded
- "the emancipation of dissonance"
- twelve-tone method
- folklore
- ethnomusicology
- Biographies
- Edgard Varèse
- Claude Debussy
- Gustav Mahler
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Anton Webern
- Alban Berg
- Igor Stravinsky
- Béla Bartók
Exam 2: All of the above material, plus the following:
- Listening skills
- rhythm and meter
- syncopation
- scale
- major and minor
- form in popular songs
- AABA form in jazz
- rhapsody
- Concepts
- Harlem Renaissance
- American music based on American sources vs. American music imitating Europe
- European use of American musics for Modernistic purposes
- ragtime
- jazz as Modernism
- serious music vs. light/popular music
- jazz as "America's classical music"
- Weimar Republic
- Marxism
- Popular Front
- New Deal
- modern dance
- populism
- Shakers
- twelve-tone technique
- electronic music
- low redundancy and high determinacy in most Modernist music
- works and composers popular with 20th century concert audiences
- chance techniques
- Biographies
- Antonín Dvorák
- Will Marion Cook
- George Gershwin
- Duke Ellington
- Bertolt Brecht
- Kurt Weill
- Aaron Copland
- Martha Graham
- Nadia Boulanger
- Milton Babbitt
- John Cage
- Samuel Barber
Final exam: All of the above material, plus the following.
For the long essay question: review the list of broad themes, and be able to draw on material from throughout the class as you construct an answer to a question addressing one of these themes.
For the listening assessment: review the outline of listening skills, and be prepared to listen to a recording in class and discuss the recording in terms of these skills.
- Listening skills
- steady pulse without regular meter
- tone cluster
- free rhythm
- Concepts
- surrealism
- birdsong in music
- modern architecture
- international style
- "starting from zero"
- sound mass/textural composition
- turning away from abstraction in late 20th century
- multitrack recording
- albums vs. singles in popular music
- Pop Art
- improvisation
- decline of concert music / centrality of popular music
- minimalism and post-minimalism
- uptown, midtown, downtown
- minimalism and the counterculture
- minimalism and the avant-garde art world
- synthesizer
- musique concrète
- sequencer
- electronics with live performance
- eclecticism
- Biographies
- Olivier Messiaen
- Krzysztof Penderecki
- Györgi Ligeti
- The Beatles
- George Martin
- Lou Reed
- John Cale
- Thelonious Monk
- John Coltrane
- Philip Glass
- Steve Reich
- John Adams