COURSE TITLE: AP Music Theory

COURSE TITLE: AP Music Theory	GRADE LEVEL: 12
CODE: MUT611	COURSE LENGTH: 18 weeks
PREPARATION: Music Theory (MUT301)

The ultimate goal of an AP Music Theory course is to develop a student's ability to recognize, understand, and describe the basic materials and processes of music that are heard or presented in a score. The achievement of this goal may be best promoted by integrated approaches to the student's development of:

aural skills	} {	listening exercises
sight-singing skills		performance exercises
written skills		written exercises
compositional skills		creative exercises
analytical skills		analytical exercises

The course descriptions for advanced placement courses published by College Boards are to be utilized for the courses entered above.

Course Content

The course should seek first to instill mastery of the rudiments and terminology of music, including:

notation
intervals
scales and keys
chords
metric organization
rhythmic patterns

It is advisable to address these basic concepts through listening to a wide variety of music, including not only music based in the European classical tonal system but also contemporary, jazz, and popular music, and the music of other cultures. Although beginning college courses focus primarily on the system of major-minor tonality, they often incorporate at least a brief introduction to the church modes, pentatonic and other scales, and twentieth-century techniques and terminology; moreover, there is increasing emphasis throughout college curricula on equipping students to deal with music of their own time and of various world cultures.

Attention should be given to the acquisition of correct notational skills. Speed and fluency with basic materials should be emphasized.

Building on this foundation, the course should progress to include more sophisticated and creative tasks, such as:
composition of a bass line for a given melody, implying appropriate harmony
realization of a figured bass
realization of a Roman numeral progression
analysis of repertoire, including study of motivic treatment, examination of rhythmic and melodic interaction between individual voices of a composition, and harmonic analysis of functional tonal passages

A brief introduction to twentieth-century scales, chordal structures, and compositional procedures should be incorporated, either through analysis or original composition.

Last Revised: July 19, 2005