Spring 2002

Music 248. Analysis of Popular Music. Professor Covach.

This seminar will consist of two areas of focus: 1) a survey of the recent music-analytical writing on popular music (Everett, Covach, Moore, Headlam, Forte, and others), as well as the methodological debates surrounding such work; and 2) analysis of a wide-ranging selection of popular music, including rock. blues, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley. Each student will select a repertory and methodological approach to write a 15-20 pp. paper.

Music 337, Section 1. Monteverdi's 'Operas'. Professor Carter.

Everyone knows that Monteverdi wrote the first 'great' operas: his Orfeo (1607) supposedly established opera as a genre for courtly entertainment, while with Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643) he participated in no less significant a theatrical revolution, the rise of 'public' opera in Venice. But locating Monteverdi's operas at the beginnings of a genre of profound significance for the Western art tradition has blinded scholars to many more immediate issues in the composer's work for the theatre. On the one hand, we ignore Monteverdi's other theatrical output-not least his intermedi, balli and dramatic cantatas-because it is viewed as somehow less significant historically and in terms of genre. On the other, we downplay the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, and even the influence of contemporary political, social and cultural contexts. More to the point, we also lose sight of the fact that Monteverdi was working on the stage and therefore had to solve the innumerable practical problems involved in bringing a theatrical work to life. I have no wish to downplay the significance of recent work on the composer, ranging from source studies to feminist criticism. However, I do also want to explore the musical and other sources for these operas and related works in new, more practical ways. That should allow us to say new things about Monteverdi. It will also enable us to think more broadly about how we might best approach opera studies today.

Music 337, Section 2. Music and Politics in the Commedia dell'Arte. Professor MacNeil.

In the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks on the US, I believe it is important, now more than ever, to make ourselves aware of the interaction between art and politics. With this in mind, I have organized a seminar to study the relationships among music, theater and the state-not of our own time, but of an era five centuries past. In so doing, I seek to provide the groundwork for an understanding of the power of musical-theatrical performance to affect and influence political events.

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The Milanese printer Pandolfo Malatesta ascribes the genesis of the commedia dell'arte to an era of peace in Italy when thoughts of survival gave way to dreams of life and humanity. His dedication to Alessandro Striggio of Giovan Battista Andreini's comedy Lo schiavetto in 1612 associates the new practice with the political calm granted by the Treaty of Cateau-CambrÈsis, signed by Henri II of France and Philip II of Spain in 1559.

From those years, when beautiful Italy began to enjoy a tranquil peace, almost as a restorative to the hardship of such continuous wars, the most valiant persons began to rediscover the ancient forgotten practice of performing comedies.

The terminus of the era he sets at the death in 1612 of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, whom he commemorates.

As important as his dating of events, Malatesta associates the performance of comedies to politics, characterizing the art form as a reprise from, and even an antidote to war. Numerous documents confirm this relationship, from the declaration by the historian Pietro Mattei that Isabella Andreini's performances are commonly used by princes to exorcize the turbulent moods of the French populace, to the Count of Fuentes' request in 1601 that Vincenzo Gonzaga send his comedians to Milan to perform for the conclave of the papal legate Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini and the Duke of Savoy. Bound to politics and civic life by Aristotelian philosophies of art in the service of the state, commedia dell'arte performances thus mirror the societies for which they are created in a manner that is both profound and perverse. Humor, with all its distortions, lies at the core, but as an adjective, modifying the critiques, commentaries and satires comedians make of the world around them.

It is the dramatist Angelo Ingegneri who, in 1598, first characterizes the commedia dell'arte by its imitation of ancient Greek and Roman ideals and the introduction of 'virgins and honest women' to the stage. While at first the appearance of women on stage might seem to invoke a simple sense of realism in an otherwise fantastical art form, it shines a powerful spotlight on the boundaries between expressions of individual excess and their subsequent regulation to social and political norms based on Classical models. The ubiquitous staging of contests between actresses rests on ideas of enacting transcendence from discord to concord, and the performance of music, especially singing, is often given as proof of a performer's attainment of celestial virtue and divine harmony.

Contributing to both Ingegneri's and Malatesta's formulations of this first flowering of the commedia dell'arte are the fortunes of the noble houses that patronize comedians and their troupes. Foremost among them stand the Medici and, in particular, the generation comprising Eleonora, Ferdinando and Maria. Medici patronage, by definition, has a strong French cast due to the long history of interwoven relations between the two courts (not for nothing does the Medici coat-of-arms bear the fleur de lis), and this intertwining of French and Tuscan affairs is further strengthened by the weddings of Ferdinando de' Medici to Christine of Lorraine in 1589 and of Maria de' Medici to Henri IV in 1600. Many commedia dell'arte performances during this period thus enunciate a dialogue between Italian and French politics, French and Italian styles. Medici influence radiates also to Mantua with the wedding of Eleonora de' Medici to Vincenzo Gonzaga in 1584, and the Mantuan court gains prominence thereafter as a center of commedia dell'arte production, as it rises to political prominence as well.

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In this seminar, we will begin by examining the techniques of commedia dell'arte production, including its masks and invocations of social and regional difference. We will then study several prominent feste that incorporate commedia dell'arte performances into the enunciation of a comprehensive political agenda, beginning with the Medici wedding festivities of 1589. Students' projects should center around some aspect of the relationship between commedia dell'arte production and politics. These may include, but are certainly not limited to, a close reading of a commedia dell'arte play or performance to show its imaging of contemporary political currents; an investigation into a festival not studied in class; an analysis of musical repertories associated with the theater in order to demonstrate their reflection of socio-political attitudes; a study of the representation of regionalism and/or nationalism in a commedia dell'arte production; an analysis of political biases in descriptions of musical/theatrical performances; an exploration into the uses of musical-theatrical styles as commentary on regional and/or political difference. ---

Music 337, Section 3. Schumann and the Ballad. Professor Finson.

We will study the ballads of Robert Schumann in the context of the German ballad during the first half of the nineteenth century. Examination of texts as well as music, autograph manuscripts, and possibly sketches. Some background in German required for secondary reading as well as study of primary sources and poetry. Reports and term papers.