Music 001A is an overview of Western musical history, examining 13 pieces of music as works of art and as moments of cultural history through a detailed study of their premiere performances. Case studies date from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, and special attention is given to techniques in musical listening. Each week we will study in detail the premiere performance of a specific musical work. Our focus will be distributed between discussions of the musical sonorities as a primary text and the socio-historical circumstances that gave rise to these works. In this vein, our course is equally a history course, and as the semester progresses you will increasingly see the difficulty in truly separating the “music itself” from its cultural contexts. Indeed, these cultural contexts are as much a part of the texts and the way they were created and heard, as the notes on the page.
- Teacher: Siel Agugliaro
- Teacher: James Blasina