Honors Music 3 – Grades 11, 12
Honors Music 3 is the last in a series of progressive courses, with content including Music Theory, Music History from the Romantic Era to present day and musicianship skills. Theory progresses from the concepts covered in Honors Music 2 to include more complex and creative tasks, such as: melodic and harmonic dictation; composition of a bass line for a given melody, implying appropriate harmony; realization of a figured bass; realization of a Roman numeral progression; analysis of repertoire, including melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, and form; and sight-singing in major and minor modes and in simple and compound meters.
Students learn to identify aural and visual procedures based in common-practice tonality, such as: functional triadic harmony in traditional four-voice texture including nonharmonic tones, seventh chords, cadence types and secondary dominants; melodic and harmonic compositional processes (e.g., sequence, motivic development); phrase structure (e.g., contrasting period, phrase group); small forms (e.g., rounded binary, simple ternary, theme and variation, strophic); and modulation to closely related keys.
Prerequisites:
- a minimum grade of 93 in Fundamentals of Music or Honors Music 2
- current or previous vocal/instrumental study
- approval of the department chair