Bachelor of Arts [B.A] [Music] From Allegheny College

The major program in Music leads to a Bachelor of Arts degree and requires the completion of 48 semester credit hours of coursework. Music majors are required to have a GPA of at least 2.0 in departmental courses required for the Music major at graduation. No courses for the major in Music may be taken Credit/No Credit. Initial course placement is given by diagnostic exam only.

Departmental courses accommodate a wide variety of musical backgrounds so that students can either begin or continue their musical development in three different areas:

• Courses that concern the sound?materials?that are used to construct musical works, their organization into systems, and their interrelationships, which give rise to musical significance. Students learn to recognize and reproduce the basic elements both in sound and in notation, both in isolation and in complete musical contexts.
• Courses that concern musical?style; its historic progression through different times, places, and cultures; and specific composers and works which contributed to that progression. Students learn to recognize by sound and sight the ways in which musical elements are combined as compositional conventions: within a particular work, within the output of a composer, and by different composers in a particular time or place.
• Courses that focus on performance, the actual production of music in sound. As the physical requirements of playing different instruments are applied to the elements of the score and to interpretative decisions, the potential of notation becomes the reality of sounded music. Repertoire for soloists is studied individually in applied lessons; repertoire for groups of performers is studied in ensembles.