Graduate Diagnostic Examination in Music History
All entering graduate students are required to take a diagnostic examination in music history before they may enroll in music history courses at the graduate level. The examination is administered one or two days before the beginning of the term in which the student first enters graduate school. It includes sections on all historical periods of Western art music, beginning with the music of the Middle Ages and continuing, period-by-period, through modern music.
The examination includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- Biographical information on important composers from each period, as well as knowledge of representative works by these composers.
- Genres, formal structures, and characteristics of style associated with specific composers or musical periods.
- Innovations of specific composers, theorists, performers, etc.
- Schools of composition, performance, etc., and the effects on music in their respective periods.
- Central concepts and information concerning the context in which important musicians were active, such as aesthetics, social history, performance practice, and intellectual and artistic movements.
Students will be required to identify major works in a listening examination.
In preparing for the examination, students may wish to consult the materials used in undergraduate music history courses at The University of Alabama, listed below:
Text: J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 7th ed., New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006.
Anthologies: J. Peter Burkholder and Claude V. Palisca, eds., Norton Anthology of Western Music, 5th ed., Vols. 1 and 2, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006.
Recordings: Claude V. Palisca, ed., Norton Recorded Anthology of Western Music, Vols. 1 and 2, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006.
rev 2/18/2008
