Learning Goals & Objectives
The Department of Music offers a 59-credit major in music leading to the B.S. degree. The undergraduate program in music offers a general program of study with emphasis on theory, musicianship, history, and performance within a liberal arts college curriculum. Graduates of the program will be prepared for further study in music education and allied disciplines such as arts management or journalism.
Learning Goal I (Musicianship and Performance): Develop understanding, hearing, and performance of music of different styles
Learning Objectives:
- Correlate internal hearing with singing and pitch identification
- Identify and perform various rhythmic patterns of increasing complexity
- Sing a piece of music at sight based on the tonal, modal, chromatic, and atonal systems
- Notate a piece of music in different musical styles
Learning Goal II (History): Understand the central musical styles and genres of Western music from roughly 1500 to the present in relation to the key social, political, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic forces that helped shape them
Learning Objectives:
- Identify central genres of the major historical periods of Western music
- Identify central stylistic and aesthetic hallmarks of the major historical periods of Western music
- Be able to identify aurally these genres and styles
- Write effectively about music using precise analytical vocabulary
- Conduct research and evaluate research material on music and its performance
- Communicate research findings in coherent prose with precise citations following the Chicago Manual of Style
Learning Goal III (Theory and Composition): Demonstrate a functional knowledge of music’s grammar and formal structures.
Learning Objectives:
- Be able to analyze music of the Western classical tradition from the 18th-21st centuries
- Write brief exercises using musical materials and concepts from the periods
- Compose appropriately for instruments of the standard orchestra for small and large ensembles
Last modified: Oct 25, 2011
