Performers: Dancers and Musicians

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. This intermediate course fulfilling elective requirements for music majors examines the relationship of musicians and dancers from the Middle Ages up to the emergence of ballet. Engaging with musical scores, iconography, theoretical writings, and a range of other textual sources, we will consider the ways in which dance (and dancers) informed music (and musicians), and vice versa, over the course of several hundred years.