StudyingPackingStudying

Technically, this is the stack of books I'm supposed to have learned by the time orientation starts next Monday. These are the materials recommended for prep work for the three placement exams. Given that I have no undergrad degree in music, it's been a bit of a sprint. Thanks to my consulting background, I've learned to focus on the most important. For me, that's the top two books on this tower.

What are the placement exams? The most important is a listening exam: 25 pieces picked out of a possible 170. The 170 vary in length from 2 minutes to 30 minutes, but they'll pick a 1 minute excerpt from anywhere in the piece, "dropping the needle" as it were. I'm supposed to write down the name of the composer, the piece, and, in several cases, the movement. Needless to say, my iPod has been on loop on these playlists as I scurry about packing all my belongings. They will also play excerpts from 5 previously unidentified pieces, asking that we categorize them by style (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc.)

There's also a music theory exam and a music history exam. For music theory, they'll give me an aural component first - listening to a single line of notes and then a double line on the piano and writing down the score. The written component involves:

• Figured bass realization (a Baroque technique that used simple notation indicating the chordal structure that was suggested. Harpsichordists used to play using just the notation and would embellish according to conventions of the time.)
• Composition using standard voice-leading rules (Yep, they have very specific guidelines about what notes can go where, what chords lead to what, and what intervals can't go together.)
• Score analysis (They give me a piece of music, and I figure out what the chords, cadences, key structure, and other fun little characteristics are.)

Music history involves 100 multiple choice questions that span Gregorian chant to the present. They're quite detailed. ("Stamitz was a composer in which European city." "Which of the following composer/poet pairs never worked together?") There is also an essay component ("Compare Verdi to Puccini").

So since I have no academic music background, the past few weeks have been filled with my learning a 220 page outline (Bless the folks at Norton for taking their Anthology of Western Music and actually creating the notes for us!), cramming music theory, and, of course, trying really hard to figure out how to distinguish the 30 minutes of the last movement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde from the first.

On the upside, I get to learn all kinds of interesting tidbits. Case in point: Mozart so admired Haydn that he actually composed six string quartets and dedicated them to him. And one of Hadyn's symphonies ends atypically, with the orchestra dying down to 2 violins at the end. Some scholars think this was a hint to his patron that the musicians were a bit disgruntled with their situation.

Time to go learn more of those tidbits! Today, it's more Mozart and all about Beethoven. Also listening to some Schoeberg and Wagner and learning about the modal mixture theory techniques.

~Hope