War

Catalog description

What is war? Why do wars exist? What are the differences between wars in the past and those being waged today and how have the conditions of conflict changed throughout history? Is there an art of war? These questions are central to the purview of this course, which examines artistic responses to war across a wide range of historical and cultural contexts from antiquity to the present. The course explores how the arts, particularly music and musical practices, play a critical role in accompanying the sociological rituals of war from the military marches part of deployment, to the laments and requiems that figure centrally in processes of mourning in the aftermath of conflict. Drawing on histories and philosophies of war, students will engage with issues related to propaganda, censorship, detention, internment, torture, heroism, sacrifice, bravery, justice, history, memory, and death and with reference to work by Homer, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Tolstoy, Shostakovitch, Britten, Picasso, Dix, Mishima, Wiesel, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, and John Lennon, among others.