The course addresses a specific question related to post-tonal music. It may regard counterpoint, harmony, form, rhythm, instrumentation and performance; however, it may be also involve neighbouring disciplines such as hermeneutics, semiotics, cognitive sciences, and theories of communication and performance.
Course Prerequisites
Basic knowledge of harmony and musical form. Experience of music analysis.
Teaching Methods
Lectures and seminars.
Assessment Methods
Written tests, oral presentations and oral exam.
Texts
Susanna Pasticci, Teoria degli insiemi e analisi della musica post-tonale (Bollettino del GATM II, 1), Bologna 1995. Joseph N. Straus, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. Michiel Schuijer, Analyzing Atonal Music: Pitch-Class Set Theory and its Contexts, Suffolk (UK): Boydell & Brewer, 2008. Domenico Giannetta, Tecniche per l’analisi della musica post-tonale, Lucca: LIM, 2023. Gianmario Borio (a cura di), Studi sull’armonia post-tonale: 1910-1940, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venezia 2025.
Contents
The Question of Form in Early Post-Tonal Music. The Formenlehre (theory of the musical form), inaugurated by Adolf Bernhard Marx after Beethoven’s death and witnessed by several treatises at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, has left traces in the writings and works of Bartók, Berg, Hindemith, Schoenberg and Webern. Chamber music is the area in which the dialogue with the past is most tangible. The adoption of traditional concepts is associated with significant changes of the thematic structures and developmental techniques. Thus the transformations of the harmonic thinking are paralleled by the way the composers dealt with phrase organization and syntactic functions.
