Stravinsky to the Present
MIT OpenCourseWare's survey of art music from roughly 1900 to today, tracing styles through chamber music, symphonic and choral works, and opera. The anthology and supplemental listening move through Expressionism, Impressionism, atonality, neo-Classicism, serialism, nationalism, jazz influence, post-tonality, electronic music, aleatory composition, performance art, post-modernism, minimalism, spectralism, the New Complexity, neo-Romanticism, and post-minimalism. Students train their listening skills while examining the historical and aesthetic motivations behind each compositional movement, comparing how composers responded to the technical and cultural shifts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Course materials include listening assignments and readings drawn from a musical anthology, structured as a full semester curriculum from MIT's Music and Theater Arts program. No prior specialized training is assumed beyond an interest in engaging seriously with unfamiliar sounds and forms.