MUS 214—Music History Survey 2

This course is Part II of the required Music History Survey for Music Majors and Minors. We will be seeking to use the skills acquired in Part I of the Survey into the investigation of Western music from the middle of the eighteenth-century through to the early 1960s. The course will develop students’ abilities to apply historical, critical, and political concepts to the specific analytic details of both musical scores and musical sound. And thus, on the pragmatic level, the course will aim to develop students? skills at reading musical scores analytically, listening to music within an historically informed framework, being able broadly to recognize the different stylistic periods, and (by means of the examinations) to develop a basic toolbox of important musical terms and to develop a memory and repertoire of different musics (through score identification). We will also continue developing the practice of reading scholarly texts, already begun in MUS 213, with the four substantial readings that have been assigned for the course of the semester. Whilst the reportorial focus of our investigations will be the works of the Western art music cannon, the larger (and more important) aims of the course will, nevertheless, be to understand that the conflicts, difficulties, and uncertainties that we face today as humans in an increasingly vexed global context are part of a long-term and ongoing debate about what the human is, what its rights should be, and how its creative, artistic and musical endeavors should relate to the social and political structures that come into being as a result. This ongoing discourse we can call, for want of a better term, modernity, and its roots lie, to a large degree, in the philosophical ideas and political and social practices that started to come into being at the point at which Part II of the survey begins: in other words, the beginning of the eighteenth century.