Performers: Music, Rhetoric, Performance

Catalog description

This course looks at the history of popular, vernacular, and art music in various time periods. Studying music from the ground up, we examine how performers have influenced music history. We engage critically with issues such as music in social life, collaborative creative processes, and vernacular music’s engagement with race and gender. The great variety and quality of the instrumental and vocal music composed in Europe during the period 1600-1800, roughly from the birth of opera to Mozart’s death, solicits today an equally wide and intriguing array of responses from instrumentalists and singers aware of pre-Romantic performance practices. In this intermediate course fulfilling elective requirements for music majors, we will study the music from this early modern period by focusing on its performance, exploring topics such as sound, relationships between text and music, improvisation, and ornamentation, among others; for opera, we will focus on staging and acting practices, then and today. We will familiarize ourselves with issues such as: national idioms, dance music, rhetoric, the history and ideology of the performance practice movement, and the critical use of editions and of primary material, including original treatises and iconographical and literary sources.