Portrait of Igor Stravinsky by Pablo Picasso (1920). (Public domain image.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. Emily Richmond Pollock
MIT Course Number
21M.260
As Taught In
Spring 2016
Level
Undergraduate
Course Description
Course Features
Course Description
This course provides an overview of the musical styles and techniques developed over the past 115 years. The anthology and supplemental listening will present a range of art music aesthetics in a variety of genres such as chamber music, symphonic and choral music, and opera. While tuning your ears to novel sounds, you will hone your own preferences and aim to understand the motivations behind and importance of a wide diversity of compositional orientations, including Expressionism, Impressionism, atonality, neo-Classicism, serialism, nationalism, the influence of jazz and popular idioms, post-tonality, electronic music, aleatory, performance art, post-modernism, minimalism, spectralism, the New Complexity, neo-Romanticism, and post-minimalism.