MYL 532E - Topical Issues in West.Music

Course Objectives

1. Through readings and discussion, students gain an intellectual awareness of one of the main contextual and interpretative issues in the study of Music History.
2. The course aims to develop an understanding of the interplay of musical repertoires with conceptual parameters
3. Students become familiar with how current ideas on the chosen topic have been formed and are expressed

Course Description

Emphasises cultural history and the philosophical background to Renaissance Humanism as an approach to the music of the period. Traditional and revisionist ideas on the origins of the Renaissance will be explored, along with key concepts such as secularism, eloquence, and rhetoric. The relationship of music theory to practice will form a major focus, as also that of text to music, studied through key genres of poetry and drama and in terms of the main thinkers of the time. Problems in musical periodisation will be addressed, and also the relation of the Italian musical Renaissance to that of northern Europe.