Music & Romanticism

Catalog description

In the nineteenth century, U.S. and European composers explored music's potential to express deeper and more powerful emotions than any other time in Western history, including those of unconscious dream states. The old "Classical" musical structures (e.g., the music of Haydn and Mozart) began to crumble under the weight of this emphasis on feeling. Understanding how this came about will be one of the main objectives for this course. Although the primary focus of this course will be the rhetorical properties of sound, a reading knowledge of music is not necessary for success in the course.