The curriculum, built upon our unique streamlined craft-based training for the complete musician, includes intensive work in the fundamental tools of musical understanding.
Counterpoint, Harmony, and all the other skills at the Academy are taught in their most simple and distilled essence.
Through the singing and playing of musical lines, assessing them for their aesthetic value, their sonority and their implications, students acquire the ability to deepen their own musical insights and voice.
Class sizes are small (maximum 12 students) to ensure individualized attention.
The EAMA Academy courses may be used towards placing out of certain required courses at your school.
Counterpoint
EAMA’s unique approach to teaching Counterpoint differs from the standard approach to the subject in significant ways. These classes are not style-based. Rather, the classes are designed for the study and perfection of contrapuntal principles fundamental to the control of all Western musical styles. Derived from the core principles of Western music, EAMA teaches Counterpoint as a distilled set of aesthetic considerations and trains the student into using powerful strategies when writing counterpoint exercises.
Keyboard Harmony
EAMA’s approach to the teaching of Harmony differs significantly from the standard textbook approach to the subject. We teach Harmony as a set of extremely simple standards and principles and progressively develop from these into understanding complex Chromatic Harmony. Distilled to the essence of the true foundations of Harmony, EAMA’s unique approach allows the student to rapidly and completely grasp the syntax of Western Harmony and to see how these simple yet powerful principles build upon themselves into every increasing complexity.
Built around Nadia Boulanger’s teachings, in our classes, we use the famous basses and melodies of Paul Vidal and Henri Challan, both of the Paris Conservatory. We offer two levels of intensive keyboard harmony training.
Musicianship and Score Reading
In her famous “cours d’accompagnement” at the Paris Conservatory, Nadia Boulanger took great effort to have her students not simply know but rather truly hear and experience the knowledge they were acquiring. To that end, musicianship classes and chorale were vital counterparts to her harmony, counterpoint, and analysis classes. Musicianship I (for new students)
This class will improve sight-singing skills through focused practice and application of all intervals. Class work will consist of Bach Chorale exercises in multiple clefs as well as projects sculpted for the individual’s goal. It will also work toward fluency in solfège and the singing and dictation of intervals, triads, basic chord progressions, tonal melodies, and scale patterns. We will work in fixed-DO solfège and will use treble, bass, alto, tenor, and soprano clefs. Other skills will include fluency in the singing and dictation of intervals, triads and seventh chords, chord progressions, atonal melodies, and scale patterns.
Analysis Flash Seminars
During the EAMA Summer Institute, Analysis is the linchpin of our program. In this course, a senior EAMA faculty member synthesizes all disciplines of our training to show how composers overcome challenges in creating their work, building small musical gestures into colossal statements of art and philosophy. At the EAMA Academy, we offer two six-week seminars on focused repertoire.
Fall 2023 Session 1: Chopin Nocturnes, with Dr. Boyle
Fall 2023 Session 2: Faure Songs, with Dr. Boyle