Graduate Music Theory Assessment

Incoming master’s students in performance, collaborative piano, piano pedagogy, music history, music theory, composition, and conducting take a music theory assessment to ensure success in graduate-level music theory courses. Based on the results of the assessment, students will be placed either in Foundations of Music Analysis, advised to take other specific music theory courses specific to their needs, or will be able to enroll in any graduate-level theory course.

The assessment is offered the week before classes start for the Fall semester (arrangements will be made for students enrolling in the Spring). For Fall 2026, the assessment will be held Tuesday, August 18, 6–9 p.m. in the Sinquefield Music Center, Room 385.

Study Guide

The assessment will cover the following material:

• Standard Western European art music and popular forms, including but not limited to binary, ternary, sonata, rondo, variation, strophic, AABA, and verse-chorus forms
• Diatonic and chromatic harmony (analysis and part writing)
• Post-tonal analytic techniques, including set theory and twelve-tone serialism
• Score reading

You can review a template of the exam with the exact wording of questions, although the musical content has been removed.

Textbooks currently used at the University of Missouri are:

• Burstein and Straus, A Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony (W. W. Norton & Company, third edition, 2025).
• Straus, Introduction to Post-tonal Theory (Prentice-Hall, fourth edition, 2016).
• Mark Gotham, Kyle Gullings, Chelsey Hamm, Bryn Hughes, Brian Jarvis, Megan Lavengood, and John Peterson, Open Music Theory, v. 2. 

Some other resources that you may find helpful for review of music theory are:

• Craig Wright, Yale Music Theory Course, Recorded Lectures, Yale University.
• Adam Ricci, musictheory.net.
• EarMaster, Understanding Music Theory.
• Laitz and Bartlette, Graduate Review of Tonal Theory (Oxford University Press, 2009).