Course: Contextual Studies: Pop/Jazz 2 B credits: 2

The CTS courses consist of the following components:
• history (general history, cultural history, and history of western music)
• music analysis (focused on the shape, structure, harmony, rhythm and texture of music)

There are three variants of the CTS course, which generally focus on three distinct movements in Western music:

• CTS classical focuses mainly on Western classical music from the Middle Ages up to and including late Romanticism
• 20th century CTS has a focus on 20th century "modern" compositional techniques
• CTS pop / jazz deals with pop music and jazz from around 1930 to the present day

As the name of the course indicates, it is about making connections; music is played in all lessons, which is alternately studied from historical, theoretical and analytical perspectives. Contents are actively processed, for example by means of listening, singing, playing, recognizing, comparing, articulating and carrying out assignments, sometimes linked to major assignments. Students are challenged to dissect music (“how does it work?”) And to reconstruct it again (“what can I do with these building blocks?”)

The main goal in the first year is to build a historical and theoretical frame of reference and conceptual apparatus around (Western) music. Getting to know and working with musical concepts plays an important role in this. Concepts can vary from relatively simple phenomena (such as a chord, an interval, a key) to more complex (such as fugue, sonata, song form, sequence, cadence), to even overarching concepts or systems (such as tonality, style period, polyphony, Gregorian chant, modality). Some of these concepts are not limited to specific currents, therefore some overlap between the three different CTS variants is not excluded and even desirable: theory is then approached and offered from various contexts.

The same method is used in years 2 and 3; the built-up frame of reference and conceptual apparatus will be further expanded and, in addition to the analysis, the synthesis (the active application of the theory, the writing craftsmanship in various contexts) will be further deepened.