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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
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.
The music history and literature entrance exam is divided into seven sections:
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.
The 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:
To review these concepts, in the left index click "Musical Form" link.