Study abroad programs in affiliation with Universities from around the world

SITUATING MUSICIANSHIP and MUSICAL MEANINGS

In this course, students develop listening skills needed for the understanding of formal concepts and musical gesture, while they simultaneously increase their abilities of doing real-time analyses. Specific exercises, including dictation and transcription, expand students’ methodological abilities to consider musical structures and meanings in a variety of diverse styles. This aural studies class provides for the development of professional skills involved in understanding and accounting for the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic aspects of complex music. Techniques of melodic form and harmonization are synthesized through further exploration of the local structures of narrative music, considering guide tones, gesture, motive, sentence, phrase and period. Throughout the course, students critically investigate issues of subjectivity and situated musical meanings emergent in hierarchical and discursive aspects of music-making.

• Scuola di lettura ritmica, Giovanni Unterberger
• 40 Solfeggi Cantanti con facili modulazioni ai Toni vinici, Edizioni Carrara
• Esthetica della musica, Enrico Fubini
• Musica – Suoni, segnali, emozioni, Fabrizio Festa

THE CRAFT OF COMPOSITION and IMPROVISATION

Students learn the basic craft of composition using diverse models and forms in European and American musics. This detailed study of composition includes aspects of narrative forms such as melody, harmony, counterpoint, voice-leading, and architectonic structures. Students engage in rigorous compositional exercises enabling the development of their craft. Time will be allocated in each class period to critically listen to music and take-home guided listening assignments will further develop course themes. Students involved in jazz and improvisation-based musics are encouraged to perform real-time musical-structural compositional tasks as improvisation. Transcriptions of improvisations are used as style guides while scores of composed music provide written models for fundamental topics. The course culminates in students presenting a composition and an improvised performance deploying the skills they developed.

• Musical Composition, Reginald Smith-Brindle
• Preliminary Exercises in Counterpoint, Arnold Schoenberg
• Models for Beginners in Composition, Arnold Schoenberg
• The Study of Counterpoint, Johann Fux

In Summer 2013 the program will run from June 3 through June 28.
The application deadline is March 31st.

Students pay all program fees of 2.750 Euro + 70 Euro Enrollment fee directly to the Accademia Europea di Firenze.

Students must apply for housing (homestays with Italian families) through the Accademia Europea di Firenze.

Students are responsible for airfare, housing, meals, local transportation, weekend travel expenses, personal expenses such as passport fee, required medical insurance, or costs incurred after the program ends.