Harmony, Form, and Score Reading

This unit deepens students’ abilities to read and analyze full and miniature scores, with emphasis on keyboard-centered representation, harmony, rhythm, and musical form. It integrates practical skills (intervals, triads, extended chords, lead‑sheet transcription, and conducting basics) with historical and contrapuntal contexts to prepare students for advanced analysis and composition work in the final unit.

Learning Objectives

• analyze full and miniature scores to identify key signatures, time signatures, clefs, instrumentation, harmonic progressions, and formal sections across representative repertoire
• apply keyboard-centered notation and visual mapping to construct and label intervals, triads, voicings, inversions, and extended chords and transcribe those harmonies into lead-sheet/fake-book symbols and tablature
• demonstrate accurate reading and notation of rhythmic values and subdivisions—including half (minim) and quarter (crotchet) notes—and perform basic conducting patterns for simple and asymmetrical meters
• evaluate contrapuntal and large-scale formal techniques (phrases, periods, fugue procedures, twelve-tone methods, and symphonic form) and relate these techniques to historical composers and movements studied