MUSC 141: Survey of Western Music
Instructor | Eduardo Sato
Summer Session 1 | May 5 – June 18 | Carolina Courses Online
This course offers a broad overview of Western music history from the Middle Ages until today. We will look at important composers, genres, and styles in order to understand the changing uses of music in society. This course is intended to provide you with a basic vocabulary to engage with both historical and contemporary music. Additionally, you will build the interpretive means to understand music’s place in culture and your own lives.
Listening is an important component of this class, and one of our main goals is to develop listening skills and vocabulary to describe what we hear. No prior knowledge of music is required. Reading assignments will provide context and technical vocabulary to help you listen through the various examples. The structure of the class proceeds in a more or less chronological fashion from the early Middle Ages up until the late 1980s. Within that basic chronological framework, lessons are organized around genres, composers, or concepts in order to provide a more in-depth look at the relationship between music and its historical context. Assignments are designed to encourage you to apply the technical vocabulary and critical thinking skills we learn in the course to music in your own lives.
The course aims to help you develop technical vocabulary to describe the elements of music, develop a broad knowledge of Western music history, discuss how music interacts with its historical context, and critically engage with and write about Western art music and music in your own lives.
There are no prerequisites for MUSC 141, and no prior musical experience is necessary. This 3-credit satisfies both the VP and NA requirements.