Analysis for Music Historians

Catalog description

This seminar will be required of all first-year graduate students in Musicology and Historical Performance Practices. It seeks to develop the analytical skills of music historians, deepening their earlier technical training and teaching them how to approach repertories (music before 1700, after 1900, popular music) they are unlikely to have studied in depth previously. In contrast to the instruction offered at CIM, this seminar will present a range of ways in which to bridge between the details of a musical composition and the historical context within which it first appeared. The seminar deals with five case studies, one representative of each of the following repertories: Before 1700 (e.g., Josquin motets, Monteverdi madrigals, Frescobaldi toccatas) 1700-1820 (e.g., Rameau keyboard suites, Beethoven sonatas, Schubert string quartets) 1820-1910 (e.g., Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, Brahms symphonies, Mahler songs) After 1910 (e.g., Stravinsky Sacre du Printemps, Webern Symphony, Ruth Crawford Seeger String Quartet, Ligeti Etudes) Popular Music (e.g. 12-bar blues, "rhythm changes," "Round Midnights") Of these, most students will have received training only in the analysis of music 1700-1820, and that training will have concentrated strictly on harmony and structure, without engagement with cultural context. Each unit of this seminar will proceed from basic grammatical norms for the repertory in question to formal criticism to cultural interpretation.