Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon successful completion students should be able to:

• Utilize basic contemporary music composition techniques to create basic musical works.
• Compose basic musical works using one’s continually developing personal music language.
• Begin to foster the creative exchange of musical ideas through basic compositional skills.

• Score and part preparation and proofing
• Completing a work from conception to performance
• Improvisation as means of generating of musical ideas
• Analysis of masterworks in variety of genres and styles (esempii classici)
• Transcription and/or arranging of preexisting works
• Balancing unity, variety and form

• Develop a portfolio of professionally prepared original scores for a variety of instrumental combinations including voice(s).
• Reading sessions of original works by peers, faculty, and semi-professional or professional performers.
• One-on-one instructor/student conferences
• Participation in written and oral peer review and evaluation
• Written quantitative/qualitative examination

Conventional and contemporary music notation practices

• Variation techniques
• Tonality, modality and atonality
• Intervallic cell-based composition and serialism as alternative means of melodic/harmonic organization
• Basic orchestration and idiomatic instrumental/vocal writing
• Melodic transformation and development technique
• Polyphony – contrapuntal and imitative procedures
• Non-tertian harmony and synthetic melodic materials
• Writing for the voice - selecting and setting text
• Indeterminancy in performance and music composition
• Graphic notation and scores
• Extended instrumental and vocal technique