MUSI 342 - Sacred, Secular, Subline: Music and Meaning in Europe, 1300-1800

What is involved in claims that music, even music without words, can “express” things, “mean” things, be “about” things? Where did the desire to conceive of music as representation come from, when and where did it emerge historically, and what political, ideological, and aesthetic paradigms does such an idea reflect, reinforce, or reject? In this course, we will trace music’s developing sense of autonomy, its changing relationship with words and its eventual freedom from them, from the Middle Ages through the late eighteenth century. We will look closely into musical works in the primary genres of European music in the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical eras: mass, motet, madrigal, variation, suite, opera, concerto, symphony. As such, we will engage with modal and tonal repertories, as well as music that exists in the space in between those fixed categories. Course readings in musicology, critical theory, and history will provide a framework for understanding how these repertories responded to changes in intellectual and political life, bringing about profound transformations in what people (composers and performers, patrons and audiences, critics and philosophers) believed music was for and what it could do, what it could say without saying. If in the European Medieval imagination music was fundamentally an adornment of the Word, by the end of the eighteenth century, its powers of signification had developed to the point where commentators would feel justified in claiming that some pieces of music were “about music itself.” In this course, we trace that story, in sounds and in words. Prerequisite(s): MUSI 113 or permission of instructor. Every year. (4 Credits)

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