Sample Year 1 and 2 Courses

Welcome! This course will provide you with an introduction to key selected questions and issues in teaching and learning music through theory and practice. The aim is to provide a stimulating and challenging environment in which you are encouraged to think about the nature and role of teaching and learning music in schools and society at large.

Why do certain notes sound good together? Why do some chords feel stable or predictable, while others feel tense or surprising? And how does harmony relate to melody, rhythm, or other musical features? This course explores such questions, introducing principles of tonal harmony and voice leading. It examines functional relationships among notes and chords in a key, and how they are combined in musical phrases.

This course provides an introduction to the field of musicology and preparation for the history sequence that follows. A premise of musicology is that music, which the philosopher Rousseau regarded as the primary speech of the soul, is a basic human activity and therefore one that engages our minds as well as our hearts.

The Western University Symphonic Band has a long-standing history of musical achievement. It was the first large instrumental ensemble at the university over 50 years ago. Our goals are to explore quality music written for the wind band and to perform it with mastery.

This course focuses on the American musical theatre of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and will involve a survey of the history of the Broadway musical through the study of selected works from the repertoire. We will look at how the different elements of the musical (music, lyrics, book, choreography, and direction) work together to create a performance.