Performers: Celebrity

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 the music major looks at the history of celebrity culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From “rival queen” actress-singers on London stages to manias over virtuoso instrumentalists, we will explore how celebrities dazzled fans, popularized repertoire, manipulated their public images, and were depicted in the media.