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Music Analysis Assignment Overview

The assignment requires students to listen to music clips by Mozart and Schumann, focusing on their contrasting features such as dynamics, articulation, timbres, and overall character. Students must also analyze the registral trajectory of a melody in one of the clips and identify the texture of several other clips. Additionally, there are questions regarding the tempo and rhythm changes in a specific peer suggestion piece.

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54 views2 pages

Music Analysis Assignment Overview

The assignment requires students to listen to music clips by Mozart and Schumann, focusing on their contrasting features such as dynamics, articulation, timbres, and overall character. Students must also analyze the registral trajectory of a melody in one of the clips and identify the texture of several other clips. Additionally, there are questions regarding the tempo and rhythm changes in a specific peer suggestion piece.

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rfswriter
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Please only work through this assignment once you have completed all

the reading (mostly Sonic Glossary entries) assigned in the homework


PDF. Like your previous assignment, this one is graded for completion
rather than accuracy, and you are encouraged to pose questions if you
have them.
Question 1. Listen to Clips 1 and 2 (all music posted to 1/24 module),
which are excerpts from pieces by Mozart and Schumann. Both clips
prominently feature scales––following Sonic Glossary, collections of tones
that traverse the octave. Before proceeding, make sure you understand
why that is. (You can pose questions about it in your response if you have
them.)
(a) Although Clips 1 and 2 share a commonality in their mutual
spotlighting of scales, they otherwise differ quite a bit. (Relatively
speaking!) In a brief paragraph of about three to four sentences, discuss
some of the ways these clips contrast with one another. You might focus
on their dynamics (i.e., volume, a quality that of course can be stable or
change over time), their techniques of articulation (the way notes are
started and stopped; consider looking this concept up online),
their timbres (the different instruments they feature), or their overall
character or mood (you could name emotional qualities, or invoke visual
or tactile metaphors). Don't be concerned with using jargon; instead, go
with the language that comes naturally to you. The boldfaced words are
terms I'll introduce in class on Wednesday.
(b) Listen again to Clip 1, but just the first 8 sections. The melody during
this passage obviously moves up and down a lot––back and forth, back
and forth––but it also has an overall trajectory with respect to register,
which I'll define in class on Wednesday as the position of musical notes
along the spectrum from low to high. What is the melody's overall
"registral" trajectory during the first 8 seconds? That is to say, does the
melody gradually become higher, or gradually become lower? Your
response here can be a single sentence.
Question 2. Identify the texture of Clips 3–6 and the two Peer
Suggestions: monophony, homophony, or polyphony? For each clip, write
a sentence explaining your reasoning. (If you don't write a sentence for
each clip, I will make a deduction.)
Clip 3 =
Clip 4 =
Clip 5 =
Clip 6 =
Peer Suggestion 1 ("Traveller"; just listen to the first minute or so) =
Peer Suggestion 2 ("Out of Time"; again just first minute or so) =
Question 3. Peer Suggestion 3 ("Sawbones") features a long buildup
starting roughly at 2:00 that culminates almost exactly at 3:00. Listen to
this stretch of music and then answer the following questions: (a) which
temporal element changes here, the tempo of the music (i.e., speed of
the beat) or the speed of the rhyhms? (b) How does the element you
identified in (a) change: by speeding up, slowing down, or some
combination? Focus especially here on 2:45–3:00.

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