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Musical language

Class at Faculty of Education |
OKND3D021B

Syllabus

At a theoretical level, the seminary will take up the following aspects:

1.       Musical form:                       Principles of formation of a comprehensible musical form: - melodic-rhythmical structure (motif = word, theme = sentence) - contrast (dynamics, colour, density, character) – gradualy development – from still to loud, from loose to dense setting, from simple to complex, and vice versa (climax and anti-climax). Fixed-constitution formal figurations - notions: songs as forms, sonatas, rondos, etc.

2.       Musical instrumentary:           Basic organological division: winds, chords (musical-bow, manual), key instruments, percussion. Stable staffing of chamber-music groups, orchestra staffing (classic, romantic). Division of human voices (SATB), division of voices according to the opera roles (soprano – colorature and dramatic, lyric; tenor, heroic; buffo, basso buffo, etc.).

3.       Musical message:                      Musical composition as a story – musical composition as an organized sequence of attractive sounds – music as communication of emotion – music as an abstract intellectual construct.  Gradual emergence of genre types constituted especially in the Romantism period  (for instance, joyful, comic, sad, tragic, solemn). Notions: absolute music, programme music,  popular music.

4.       Musical genres:                        Chamber music, orchestral music, vocal music, vocal-instrumental music, opera – cycles of minor compositions, sonatas, duos, trios, quartets, quintets – symphonies,  ouvertures, symphonic poems – chamber songs, cantatas, oratoira, Church music, etc.              A number of themes will be accompanied by selected samples of musical-composition recordings of various style epochs, various genres, various character and different instrumental staffing.

Annotation

Primary perception of musical matter of various style epochs, styles and genres. Under the word “music” we imagine today a fairly distinctive artistic activity.

In the world of today, however, the width of this word is immense. What do we understand under the notion “music”? Where is the origin of the most traditional idea of a sense-conveying musical composition? Why do we ingest some kind of music without problems, and some other kind we hear as difficult, or fail to understand it altogether? This seminar will induce the students to try to penetrate the musical structures of various compositions, and teach them to perceive various composition procedures from early history to the present time.