Composers: Medieval Songwriters

Catalog description

This course will center on the biography, works, and cultural context of a specific composer or group of composers. As well as introducing students to the musical works of the composer(s), the course will examine issues such as reception history, the canon, mechanisms of cult formation, authorship and attribution, identity, historical and social contexts, and nationalism and patriotism. Fulfills Arts and Letters Requirement. In this course we explore the sometimes anonymous, sometimes named creators of song across Europe, ca. 1100-1500. Some, like Philip the Chancellor, wrote serious, even polemical Latin songs, while others, such as Adam de la Halle, wrote works firmly entrenched in the poetics of courtly love. In the course we will consider issues of authorship/composership; attribution and transmission; linguistic and national song styles; and the contemporary reception of the medieval “troubadour.”