MUSI 001A. 1000 Years of Musical Firsts

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.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for MDST.
Fall 2024. Blasina.
Department website: Music

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