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WMU Music Graduate Entrance Exams

Overview, Instructions and Exam Format


Music History Review

Medieval

Renaissance

Baroque

Classic

Romantic

Modern


Music Theory Review

Harmony

20th-century Techniques

Musical Form

Spotlights

The WMU Graduate Music History and Theory Entrance Exams

This site is specifically designed to help incoming graduate students at the Western Michigan University School of Music prepare to take the comprehensive entrance exams in music history and theory. It also is a means for current graduate music majors to study before they retake any section of the entrance exam that they did not pass the first time. It is intended as a review-- not a replacement for dedicated courses in music theory, or undergraduate survey courses/seminars in the six historical style periods of Western art music.

Music History

MusicHistoryPictureThe music history and literature entrance exam is divided into seven sections:

  1. Listening Identification:
    Multiple choice (six examples, one for each era). Identify the genre and the probable composer.
  2. Medieval: Multiple choice (16 questions)
    12 questions: composers, theorists, genres, sources; 4 score identification questions
  3. Renaissance: Multiple choice (16 questions)
    12 questions: composers, genres, instruments, sources (manuscripts, treatises); 4 score identification questions
  4. Baroque: Multiple choice (16 questions)
    12 questions: composers, compositional techniques, genres; 4 score identification questions
  5. Classic: Multiple choice (16 questions)
    12 questions: composers, styles, genres, opera; 4 score identification questions
  6. Romantic: Multiple choice (16 questions)
    12 questions: composers, genres, instruments, terms; 4 score identification questions
  7. Modern: Multiple choice (16 questions)
    12 questions: composers, terms, compositional techniques, works; 4 score identification questions

    Note: The score identification section for each era have 2 one-page score excerpts (for each, you are asked to identify the genre, and the most probable composer, from multiple-choice lists)

    Click here to see the question format for all sections of the music history exam

How to Study with the Interactive Music History review modules
There are six interactive study modules for the music history review (see left-side index on this page), combining interactive graphic timelines, glossaries, brief composer descriptions, and information on specific pieces you should know (with score excerpts and links to YouTube clips). After you have read the basic background about a piece and looked as its score excerpt, you should listen to at least part of its YouTube example. It is pointless to memorize terms and definitions unless you can connect them to actual music.

Music Theory

MusicTheoryPictureThe graduate music theory entrance exam is divided into three main aspects:


Harmony
This part of the exam covers all aspects of traditional diatonic and chromatic functional harmony through multiple-choice questions of the following types:

- Match terms to definitions
- Identify proper and improper voice leading in given musical examples
- Identify the chord type, harmonic function or cadence type in given musical examples
- Identify the non-harmonic tone or concept represented in given musical examples
- Choose the missing chords (roman numeral) in given harmonic progressions

To review these concepts, in the left index click the "Harmony" link.

20th-century Techniques
This part of the exam covers modern modes and scale systems, modern harmonic simultaneities/cluster "chord" types, and modern rhythmic terms and concepts, through multiple-choice questions of the following types:
 
- Match terms to definitions
- Identify the techniques represented in given musical examples

To review these concepts, in the left index click "20th-century Techniques" link.

Form
This part of the exam has three parts:

  1. Basic Forms: Multiple choice (5 questions): In a musical score of a short Romantic-era piano piece,
    - Identify the basic form of the piece (binary, rounded binary, waltz, simple ternary, compound ternary)
    - Identify types of internal phrase units (period, phrase group, phrase chain, repeated phrase, etc.)
    - Identify specific harmonic structures (Italian 6, German 6, Neapolitan, dominant 7, secondary dominant)
    - Determine the key of a modulation in relation to the main key of the piece (dominant, relative major, subdominant, subdominant of the relative major, etc.)
  2. 18th-century Fugue: Multiple choice (8 questions): In a musical score of a Bach fugue, you must identify
    - subject
    - countersubject
    - answer ("tonal" or "real," and its harmonic relationship to the main key of the work)
    - fugal exposition
    - episode
    - invertible counterpoint
    - inversion, augmentation, diminution of the subject
    - stretto
    - double fugue
  3. Sonata Form: Multiple choice (7 questions): In a musical score of a Classic sonata-form movement
    - Label exposition, development, recapitulation, transition, retransition, coda
    - Identify specific harmonic structures and their function in the score (tonic, subdominant, dominant, submediant, relative major, parallel minor, Neapolitan, chromatic, borrowed, secondary leading-tone

To review these concepts, in the left index click "Musical Form" link.