PLACEMENT EXAM IN MUSIC HISTORY (General Information)

The Placement Exam in Music History is administered at the beginning of Fall semester (usually on the Saturday prior to Week 1, on the same day as the Theory Placement). Students should contact Dr. Andrew Greenwood (agreenw@siue.edu), Assistant Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Studies, for information as to the specific time and location. The Placement Exam in Music History includes the following sections:

• Listening and Score Identifications: 12 examples, for which students are asked to identify and/or provide best educated guesses for a likely composer, approximate date, genre, form (as appropriate), and title (where possible), and then to justify their responses with pertinent style features heard in the excerpt and/or visible in the score (justifications and explanations required, even if you know the piece).

• Musical Terms: vocabulary terms from Antiquity to Present (periods,

composers, works, genres, forms, musical styles, etc.) to be identified and/or defined.

• Standard Repertory: elaboration of 12 works of your choice in the

standard repertory (e.g., identifying composer, date of composition, genre, formal structure, and briefly summarizing plots/programs, explaining titles/circumstances for which a work was written). At least 5 of these works discussed should come from 20th-century to Present, including a mixture of vocal and instrumental works.

• Essay: answer two from a series of open-ended long answer essay

questions, citing and discussing musical works in support of your answer. Students are allowed two hours to complete the Placement Exam in Music History. Students who score at least an 80% on the entire Exam (with no individual section being below 70%) need not take MUS 500B Graduate Music History Review. To prepare for the Placement Exam in Music History, students should:

• Review the notes from their undergraduate course(s) in Music History and/or Musicology.

• Re-examine standard music history texts, score anthologies, and recordings such as recent editions of the following (not an exhaustive list):

o A History of Western Music and the accompanying Norton Anthology of Western Music (3 vols.), eds. Peter J. Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. Currently these are used by undergraduate music majors at SIUE for the music history survey. The simplified Norton Concise History of Western Music (ed. Barbara Russano Hanning), commonly used as a substitute text (albeit simplified) coupled with the above anthologies, is a potential alternative.

o Oxford History of Western Music: College Edition, eds. Christopher H. Gibbs and Richard Taruskin, and the accompanying Oxford Anthology of Western Music (3 vols.) and recordings.

o A History of Music in Western Culture (ed. Mark Evan Bonds) and accompanying Anthology of Scores and recordings.

• Examine a recent Opus catalog for an idea of which works are in the standard repertory. This book lists currently available recordings; therefore, works with many recordings tend to be in the standard repertory.

• Consult the Harvard Dictionary of Music for definition of standard musical terms, and/or use the glossary sections in the suggested texts above.