Harmony II: Techniques for Composing Contemporary Music

In this course, you learn the techniques of twentieth/twenty-first century harmony while also applying the theoretical concepts to your own compositions. You are exposed to a wide variety of modern-era harmonic practices, starting with an introduction to the French Impressionists of the late nineteenth century and then moving forward to current trends of today. Instruction consists of three stages: establishing a foundation in contemporary harmonic techniques, studying the music scores of the great masters who demonstrate these techniques, and creating your own compositions by emulating what you have learned. Harmonic concepts include: modality and tonal ambiguity of the impressionists, total chromaticism, free atonality, serialism, bitonality, modern scales, pandiatonicism, tone clusters and sound mass, minimalism, neo-romanticism and more. Scores studied include works by Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky, Ligeti, Penderecki, Reich, Adams, Glass, Part and Whitacre. Utilizing many of the concepts learned, you work on your own compositions and study scores that use many of these harmonic techniques.