Music Humanities Syllabus
Music Humanities Syllabus, 2020
The focus of Music Humanities is on the many forms of the Western musical imagination in art music, through works studied in their historical and cultural contexts. The specific goals of the course are to awaken and encourage active, critical, and comparative listening practices, to provide tools to respond verbally to a variety of musical idioms and performances, and to create engagement with the debates about the character and purposes of music that have occupied composers and musical thinkers since ancient times.
The course moves chronologically from the Middle Ages to the present, examining the choices and assumptions of composers, audiences, and performers, and exploring what we can and can’t know about how music of the past may have sounded. Students’ critical perceptions and articulate responses to the music, to the performances, and to the source readings that are a hallmark of the Core, will be a vital part of the class.
In the absence of live music events in New York City during Fall 2020, performers will be zooming into our virtual classroom, and modes of mediated listening will be one of our topics.
I. Elements of Music
Sound, rhythm, melody, harmony, tone color
II. Medieval & Renaissance Music
Hildegard of Bingen and Gregorian Chant
Perotin, Viderunt Omnes
Beatriz de Dia, A Chantar
Josquin des Prez, Ave Maria
III. Baroque Music
Monteverdi, L’Orfeo; Hor che’l cielo e la terra
Handel, Messiah
Bach, The fugue
IV. Classical Music
Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro
Mozart, Piano concerto in G major, no. 17, K. 453
Beethoven, Symphony no. 5 in C minor
V. Romantic Music
Schubert, Erlkönig
Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique
Clara Schumann, Piano Trio in G minor
Chopin, Nocturnes
Wagner, The Ring Cycle
Verdi, La traviata
VI. 20th- & 21st-Century Music
European modernism: Debussy, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune; Stravinsky, Le Sacre du printemps;
Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire
American modernism and experimentalism: Still, Afro-American Symphony; Crawford Seeger, String
Quartet 1931; Copland, Appalachian Spring; Cage, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano
Jazz: Armstrong/Oliver, West End Blues; Ellington, It Don't Mean a Thing; Parker, Ornithology
Music of the Civil Rights era: Holiday, Strange Fruit; Mingus, Fables of Faubus; Roach, Freedom Now
Suite; Simone, Mississippi Goddamn
Electronic Music
Reich, Tehillim
Saariaho, L’amour de loin