Music - 4-period course (column 3): score analysis, harmony and style
The four-period course in Music (column 3) goes beyond listening into analysis. You work from a score, a notated excerpt or a detailed aural map, and you are expected to name what happens harmonically and formally, situate the style, and argue from the notation. The exam rewards precision: Roman numerals with inversions, cadence types named exactly, bar numbers cited, and stylistic claims supported by the notes on the page.
Core toolkit
- Form: binary and ternary; sonata (exposition, development, recapitulation, coda); rondo; theme and variations; fugue (subject, answer, countersubject, episode); strophic versus through-composed; da capo aria; minuet and trio.
- Harmony: Roman numerals with figured inversions (V6, I6/4); secondary dominants (V/V); pivot-chord modulation; cadences - perfect authentic (V–I, root position, tonic in the top voice), imperfect authentic, half, plagal, interrupted (V–vi).
- Style conventions: Baroque continuo and terraced dynamics; Classical periodic phrasing and Alberti bass; Romantic chromaticism and expanded orchestra; twentieth-century extended techniques and modal or octatonic writing.
Worked example
An eight-bar excerpt in C major: bars 1–2 I–V6; bars 3–4 vi–ii6–V, the melody ending on the second degree; bars 5–8 I–IV–I6/4–V7–I, the melody ending on the tonic.
Reasoning: two four-bar phrases. The first closes on V - a half cadence - so it is an antecedent. The second ends V7–I with both chords in root position and the tonic in the top voice - a perfect authentic cadence - so it is a consequent. Together they form a parallel period. The I6/4 is a cadential six-four decorating the dominant; label it V6/4–5/3 rather than as a tonic chord.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling every V–I a perfect cadence when the chords are inverted or the top voice carries the third.
- Treating a cadential 6/4 as tonic harmony.
- Claiming a modulation without a confirming cadence or pivot chord.
- Mixing period labels ("Baroque sonata form").
- Describing mood instead of citing bar numbers, pitches and figures.
- In part-writing: parallel fifths or octaves, a doubled leading note, an unresolved seventh.