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Schenker Paper
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SPRING QUARTER 2004 SYLLABUS
Class time & location
Tuesdays and Thursdays, room 214, 9:00–10:50 am, Tuesday March 23 – Thursday May 27, 2004
Please note that owing to performing commitments, I will be absent from school in the first week of May. There will be no class on Tuesday 4 May or Thursday 6 May. We may schedule make-up time or, alternatively, tutorial-style meetings in small groups.
Instructor
Jonathan Leathwood
office number 302
jleathwo@du.edu
303 830 7649 (home)
303 871 6929 (office)
My office phone has no voice mail: use my home number to leave messages
Textbook
Allen Forte & Steven Gilbert, Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis, New York & London, Norton, 1982.
You must own a copy of the textbook to take this course. Copies are available in du’s bookshop in the Driscoll Center.
Other useful writings
I would suggest to browse Schenker’s own writings, all on reserve in the library:
Five Graphic Music Analyses, New York, Dover, 1969: MT140.S29
The Masterwork in Music: A yearbook, ed. William Drabkin, transl. Ian Bent et al., Cambridge University Press, 1994, in two volumes: (vol 1) MT6.S2874 M413 1994 V.1; (vol. 2) MT6.S2874 M413 1994 V.2
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: A portrayal of its musical content, with running commentary on performance and literature as well, transl. ed. John Rothgeb, Yale University Press, 1992: MT130.B43 S313 1992
Structure of the course
Our plan is simple: we will aim to cover a single chapter each class. We may move slower than this, or skip the odd chapter here and there.
Our ambition will be to reach chapter 19. Anyone who has studied and understood the concepts up to there will be able to extend their study of Schenkerian analysis to the end of the book and to other writings.
Assignments & grading
Assignments will be set each week in Tuesday’s class. They must be handed in on Friday at 1 pm. Please put them in the tray outside my office, room 302, rather than my mailbox in the music office.
Please take this deadline seriously. Late work may not be corrected and graded that week, and a 5% penalty may be applied to the grade for that assignment.
Each assignment will be given a score out of 100. An average will be taken at the end of the quarter to give the final grade. Grades will be converted as follows:
70+ A
67 A-
64 B+
60 B
57 B-
54 C+
50 C
etc.
The apparently low score needed to get an A reflects the severity of the grading! Since so much submitted work will be in the form of handwritten musical scores, neatness will be rewarded. Use a pencil with 2.5 lead or softer. A simple pencil, frequently sharpened, will probably give better results than a mechanical one. Get a click-eraser (the kind that resembles a mechnical pencil): they are very clean. You can download some suitable manuscript paper at the top of this page. Other than for making manuscript paper, there is no place for Finale software in this course, and work prepared using Finale will be rejected.
Attendance
You are allowed two unexcused absences; I’ll deduct 5% from your final grade for each absence after that. Please contact me ahead of time for excused absences, on either my home number or by email (remember that my office number has no voice mail).
*
Syllabuses are made for people, not the other way round. It may be necessary to make sweeping changes depending on the progress of the course and the people involved. I hope very much that you will find our course together nourishing and stimulating. If you feel that it is proving not to be, I beg you to come and speak with me about your concerns and we will try to address them.
Finally, if you are a student with a documented disability on record at the University of Denver and wish to have a reasonable accomodation made for you in this class, please let me know right away.
—JL, 21 March 2004