THE MUSIC HISTORY PLACEMENT EXAM

 

            A Music History Placement exam is given each fall during orientation week (see Orientation Schedule for details).  Masters students, in order to graduate, must either pass this exam or take Music History Review.  Undergraduates who have taken music history courses at another institution may take the placement exam to demonstrate their knowledge in lieu of taking Music 207-208.

            The exam has two parts.  The first tests general knowledge of music history.  It consists of short answer, true-false, and multiple choice questions based on Burkholder-Grout-Palisca A History of Western Music (7th edition). The second section consists of score identifications.  Students are given about fifteen xeroxed excerpts drawn from the Norton Anthology of Western Music (5th edition) and are asked to identify the genre of music, the composer, and the approximate date of composition.

            The best way to study for the first part of the exam is to use the Norton website: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/music/grout7/home.htm.  The “flash cards” section is particularly useful. Questions on the placement exam will are taken from the questions on these quizzes, but they may be in a different format than seen on the website. Students can review the material by clicking on “Chapter outlines,” or by reading the book itself.

            For the second half of the exam, there is a website at the following address: http://www.sfcm.edu/pdf/History_Placement.pdf.   It consists of a PDF file with about 50 score excerpts from the Norton Anthology.  Answers are printed upside down at the bottom of each page. The scores on the placement exam will be drawn from all the scores in the Norton Anthology, not just the scores on the website.

            Students are not expected to know all the answers on the Norton website or to be able to identify and date all the scores in the Norton Anthology.  But the more you review on the websites and the more you practice answering questions like these, the better you will do on the exam.  The majority of students pass every year.