Fall 2003

Music 248. The Contrapuntal Idioms of J.S. Bach. Professor Warburton.

The course will begin with a quick study of basic contrapuntal forms: the invention and the three-voice fugue, including some composition based on Bach as model. Then the semester will confront The Musical Offering from the analytical as well as the historial/interpretive point of view. After the middle of the semester each person will study a work by Bach with regard to issues established during the earlier part of the semester. Class projects will involve oral and written presentations as well as some composition of contrapuntal pieces.

Music 249, Section 1. Music in American Film. Professor Finson.

We will study the basic techniques and repertory of music in classic American documentary and feature films (excepting musicals) from the inception of sound to the present day. Our explorations will unfold in a "reading" format using a basic text and examining various cases of both "score" (background) and "source" (in-frame) music. Two shorter papers, reports, viewing.

Music 249, Section 2. Periodization and the Renaissance Canon. Professor MacNeil.

The new edition of Source Readings in Music History, first compiled in 1950 by Oliver Strunk and recently revised and enlarged by Leo Treitler with the assistance of seven period editors, marks a major turning point in the history of the field. Strunk, through translations of sources, established a canon, his stated purpose “to make conveniently accessible to the teacher or student of the history of music those things which he must eventually read.”

Gary Tomlinson’s definition of the Renaissance (volume 3 of Treitler’s revised series) avoids this type of canonicity entirely. His statement that “the Renaissance, we might say, forms a coherent historical epoch mainly through its sense of a breakdown of coherence,” reconfirms a general unease among music historians about periodization, stylistic analysis and the canon that now courses through the field.

In this seminar, we will asses the central musicological texts on periodization of the Renaissance (Pirrotta, Brown, Palisca, Tomlinson,et. al.) and conduct our own analyses of musical style and the Renaissance canon. Thematic issues to be studied include the secularization of religious authority as seen in motets and masses by composers like Josquin, Palestrina and Lasso; the developments of new musical genres (madrigal, chanson, villançico); the advent of music-print culture; and the rise of Renaissance Neo-Classicism.

A typical week’s assignment would be no more than 100 pages of reading, together with a stylistic analysis of one or two compositions (say, two madrigals, or a single motet).

Music 337. What's in a key? Modal types and tonal practices in music of the Classic era. Professor Carter.

Within an equal-tempered system, any given scale is transpositionally equivalent to any other: thus, C major should "sound" the same as D major, and G minor the same as A minor. Yet we all know this not to be the case, and can reasonably hear the difference when Mozart writes in B flat major and in A major. In part this is to do with how instruments sound in different keys: clarinets in E flat major, violins in G major, and horns and trumpets in D major are all very characteristic. It is also to do with a given composer's mannerisms: Beethoven's C minor is entirely different from his D minor. But this is neither a sufficient nor a complete explanation for a complex set of phenomena.

Specific key characteristics are acknowledged by eighteenth-century music theorists (as Rita Steblein has demonstrated), and have their roots in Baroque Affektenlehre on the one hand, and the legacy of Renaissance modal practices on the other, where specific "major" and "minor" scales take on the identities of specific modes. This becomes particularly clear in opera, where links between keys and emotional affects can usually be demonstrated quite clearly (and equally clearly, such links become transferred to seemingly "abstract" instrumental music). There are also structural issues in play: one can demonstrate, for example, that some middleground and other prolongational strategies are key-specific, whereas others are not. But while there is some discussion of this in the musicological and theoretical literature, we lack a comprehensive data-set to provide a basis for comparison. Also, we need to develop the tools to create typologies of Classic tonal practices so as to identify key-"families" and their subdivisions within repertories partitioned by genre and medium, on the one hand, and by (groups of) composers on the other. In our seminar, we shall grapple with precisely these issues, grounding our work in eighteenth-century texts and in the secondary literature to date, but also engaging in various historical and analytical ways with a wide range of music to see just what the problems are and how they might be dealt with. On that basis, we will then proceed to a series of case-studies that will themselves establish a basis for various potential larger-scale research projects to come.