Welcome to NEC! As Chair of the Music Theory Department, I am writing to let you know what to expect when you arrive in late August. Since graduate students at New England Conservatory come from diverse national and international backgrounds, a diagnostic Competency Exam is given to ensure that each student who joins us has acquired certain essential skills and information.
This exam will be given on Tuesday, August 30, between 7:00 and 10:00 p.m.
All Master of Music students must pass the exam before enrolling in graduate courses offered by the Music Theory Department. It is also strongly recommended that Graduate Diploma students take the exam; while they are not required to take theory classes at NEC, they must pass the exam in order to have the option of doing so.
The Music Theory Competency Exam covers four areas:
(This last portion is required of only some students, and will be administered on Friday of Orientation week. Further explanation is provided below.)
Have a wonderful summer, and I look forward to seeing you during Orientation week!
Sincerely,
Dr. Katarina Miljkovic, Chair
Music Theory Department
Explanation of graduate placement exam (Orientation)
Formal/Harmonic Analysis
This section of the exam contains several subsections:
| part- writing (15%) | You will be provided with a key, meter, and a series of Roman numeral labels; you are to notate the progression in four-part harmony (chorale style). This will be a short progression of no more than eight chords. |
| analysis (60%) | You will be asked several questions on a movement, or section of a movement, from the 18th or 19th century. (You will be provided with the score, and the piece will also be played for you.) Questions will focus on any of the following: phrasing and cadences, form, overall tonal plan, harmonic analysis, nonchord tones and motivic analysis. Answers will require explanations or descriptions in English prose, and possibly markings on the score. |
| other pieces/ excerpts for analysis (25%) | Be prepared for any of the following (these will not be played for you): • an excerpt from the 18th or 19th-century repertoire (harmonic analysis, nonchord tones, phrase structure) • an excerpt from a jazz standard for voice and piano (harmonic analysis, nonchord tones, phrase structure) • an excerpt from the 20th or 21st century. Be prepared for questions on phrasing, motives, texture, or recurrent intervallic structures (for instance, the use of motives and/or chords that share the same intervallic content). |
Melodic Ear Training
| identification and notation of melodic intervals (16%) | |
| dictation of unaccompanied melodic fragments (3 pitches per fragment) (18%) | For this exercise, a major key will be established for you. You will then hear a series of three-note melodic fragments in that key; you should notate these fragments in whole notes. (Rhythm is not a factor in this exercise.) You will be given two hearings for each fragment. |
| rhythmic dictation (10%) | A meter will be established for you, after which you will hear a short melodic fragment. You are asked to notate only the rhythm of the melody. |
| dictation of an accompanied melody | You will hear an accompanied melody; you are asked to notate the melody only (not the accompaniment). Please be aware that the meter and the barlines will not be provided for you. (Since you will need to determine the meter on your own, you might want to practice identifying meters from recordings in preparation for this portion of the exam.) Since we are not telling you what the beat is, there might be several meters that would be acceptable; we will allow for several possibilities. Also, while we will tell you the key of the passage, we will not play the tonic pitch ahead of time; you are expected to infer the tonic from the melody itself. Assume that the melody could conclude with any of the following cadences: perfect authentic, imperfect authentic, or half cadence. (To put it another way: the final scale degree of the melody might or might not be the tonic.) You will hear the accompanied melody in its entirely six times. |
Harmonic Ear Training
| identification of chord quality: triads (10%) | Your choices are major, minor, diminished, or augmented |
| identification of chord quality: seventh chords (10%) | Be prepared for the three following seventh-chord qualities: major-minor (same as dominant seventh); minor, and fully diminished. |
| tonal harmonic progressions: provide soprano, bass, and Roman numeral labels (80%) |
Sight Singing
This portion of the test will be required only for those students who fail the Melodic Ear Training portion of the exam. For more details about this test, see below.
How the placement exam results will affect you
We offer two remedial courses, one section each semester: Introductory Sight-Singing and Ear Training (THYG 081), and Principles of Harmony and Form (THYG 082). The following summarizes the relationship between each exam component of the Music Theory Competency Exam and these two remedial courses.
Formal/Harmonic Analysis
Students who do not meet the minimal standards for passing this component will have the choice of (1) taking this exam component again until they do pass it, or (2) enrolling in, and passing, Principles of Harmony and Form.
Melodic Ear Training
Students who do not meet the minimal standards for passing this component will have the choice of (1) taking this exam component again until they do pass it, or (2) enrolling in, and passing, Introductory Sight-Singing and Ear Training.
Harmonic Ear Training
Students who do not meet the minimal standards for passing this component will have the choice of (1) taking this exam component again until they do pass it, or (2) enrolling in, and passing, Principles of Harmony and Form.
Sight-Singing
As noted earlier, this exam is taken only by those who have failed the Melodic Ear Training portion of the test. This portion of the exam is not pass/fail; in other words, there will be no negative consequences if you do poorly on it. On the contrary, your performance on this section could help you in an important way: if your score on the Melodic Ear Training portion is just below passing, a strong performance on the Sight Singing component could help pull up that grade to passing.
Otherwise, your performance on this portion will help us to advise you of your options for fulfilling the melodic ear training requirement. For instance, we might strongly recommend that you enroll in THYG 081, or we might suggest that you address the deficiency through self-directed work with ear training software.
Remedial Courses
To summarize, the following explains how each exam component will “feed into” our two remedial courses for those students who do not pass that component.
| Exam Component | Course that would fulfill the deficiency |
| Formal/Harmonic Analysis » | Principles of Harmony and Form |
| Melodic Ear Training » | Introductory Ear Training and Sight-Singing |
| Harmonic Ear Training » | Principles of Harmony and Form |
| Sight Singing » | (not applicable) |
Please be aware of the following
- Remember that enrollment in the courses shown in the right column of the table above is voluntary. In other words, if you fail any of the exam components, you are not required to enroll in the course that remediates that deficiency. You may instead choose to retake the exam (or rather, the portion of the exam that you failed the first time) the next time it is offered. The exam is given twice during the year: during fall Orientation, and in January at the beginning of the spring semester.
- Since we are able to offer only one section of each remedial course per semester, it is possible that we will not be able to accommodate all students who would like to enroll in those courses. In such cases, the Theory Department will need to make some difficult decisions regarding the final class list. Please know that we will be as fair and objective as possible in making these decisions.
If you would like to enroll in a remedial course and are not able to (whether because of limited available spaces, or any other reason), you should try to take the relevant portion of the exam the next time it is offered.
Testing dates and times
As explained earlier, all components of the exam, except for Sight Singing, will be given on Tuesday, August 30, 7:00–10:00 p.m. in Brown Hall. Students need a photo I.D. for admission to the exam. Please note that you may use a paper English translation dictionary during the exam. (Electronic dictionaries of any kind are not allowed.)
Attendance at the exam is required. There will not be any make-up dates for this test.
For those students who need to take it, the Sight Singing exam will be given on Friday, September 2, which is also the day on which you will be registering for courses. The exam will consist of a ten-minute individual appointment with a faculty member, during which you will be asked to sing several melodies at sight. You may sing with any method that you prefer (solfege syllables, neutral syllables, etc.).
We will notify all students of their grade on the Melodic Ear Training exam by Thursday, September 1. If your grade for that portion of the exam is below passing, you should plan to show up for a sight-singing session on Friday the 2nd, approximately forty-five minutes before your registration appointment. (More details will be provided at your orientation meeting.)
Preparing for the exam
The following materials, among many others, present music theory materials, skills, and concepts helpful for establishing a background for graduate-level study. They also are helpful for students who wish to review the American-English terminology for such work. However, students might wish simply to review their undergraduate music theory work in preparation for the exam.
Fundamentals, Harmony, and Form
Stefan Kostka and Dorothy Payne: Tonal Harmony (McGraw-Hill)
Bruce Benward/Jackson: Practical Beginning Theory (McGraw-Hill)
George Thaddeus Jones: Music Theory (College Outline Series; HarperCollins)
Douglass Green: Form in Tonal Music, 2nd Ed. (Harcourt College Publishers)
Ear Training
Anne Blombach: MacGAMUT (music software): can be purchased at www.macgamut.com
Bruce Benward/ Timothy Kolosick: Ear Training: A Technique for Listening (McGraw-Hill)
Sight-Singing Skills
Robert Ottman and Nancy Rogers: Music for Sight Singing (Prentice-Hall)
Lars Edlund: Modus Vetus (Edition Wilhelm Hansen)
2011-06-28
VIRGIL THOMSON