MUSICOLOGY

Fall semester 2008

Note 1: Graduate students should elect at the 500-level or above.

Note 2: The Faculty Council on Graduate Studies has ruled that all Musicology courses at the 500 level or above, except MUSICOL 503 and 509, will count towards the coursework alternative to the Music History Preliminary Examination. Your department may have particular requirements for Musicology courses. Check with your advisor.

Special Course: Topics in 19th-Century Opera (MUSICOL 405/505), 3 cr. hrs.                    Prof. Wiley
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 505.
This is a survey of 19th-century European opera, organized by country and time, and with consideration given to principles of theatricality as well as musical style in the repertoires. Selected collections of opera will form the basis of lectures distinguishing nation and time period, with a major work from each collection singled out for closer scrutiny. Works so designated are: La Juive, The Flying Dutchman, La traviata, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, The Queen of Spades, and Otello. Grading factors are (1) two hour and a final examination in essay format, and (2) quizzes on synopses and listening assignments, and a paper for students who enroll in MUSICOL 505, comprising a musico-dramatic analysis of an opera not among those considered in class.

Special Course: Topics in Ethnomusicology (MUSICOL 405/506), 3 cr. hrs.                              Staff
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 506.

Special Course: Music of the American Avant-Garde (MUSICOL 407/507), 3 cr. hrs.
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 506.                                                                                Prof. Wierzbicki
This class will focus on the American avant-garde tradition that flourished in the middle of the 20th century but whose roots arguably date back more than 200 years and whose influence still resonates today. Along with their European counterparts, composers whose work will be discussed include Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Terry Riley, Harry Partch, Conclon Nancarrow, George Antheil, Max Neuhaus, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, David Tudor, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, and La Monte Young. The centerpiece of the discussion, however, will be the innovative music and ideas of the American composer-philosopher John Cage.

History of the Symphony (MUSICOL 411/511), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                Staff
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 511.

History of Opera (17th-18th Centuries) (MUSICOL 413/513), 3 cr. hrs.                                  Prof. Stein
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 513.
This course is devoted to the study of opera in the first two centuries of its existence, from its beginnings just before 1600 to nearly the end of the 18th century. Opera is to be studied critically as music, as theater, as spectacle, as performance medium, and as cultural expression. Special aspects of this course include lectures on operatic eroticism, singers of baroque opera, opera's arrival in the Americas, and the financing and staging of early opera. While some of the lectures and listening assignments will be organized around excerpts, others will be designed to focus on whole operas, their music and musical dramaturgy, historical significance, economics, modes of production, and reception in performance. Composers to be studied include Peri, Caccini, Da Gagliano, Monteverdi, Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Hidalgo, A. Scarlatti, Handel, Vivaldi, Hasse, Rameau, Gluck, Salieri, Sarti, Piccinni, Mozart, and Haydn. The assignments in this course will be primarily listening assignments, supplemented by score study, readings from the course-pack or materials on reserve and on C-Tools, and some in-class performances. Grades will be based on written work (three short papers), and class participation.

History of Jazz (MUSICOL 417/517), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                            Prof. Garrett
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 517.
This course surveys the historical growth and development of the various kinds of music that have been called "jazz" in the United States. Structured as a chronological overview, the course places the musical conventions, significant performers, and key aesthetic shifts of jazz in cultural, technological, and social context. Students will learn not only to identify the differences between a wide range of jazz styles but also to analyze and interpret the meanings of these differences. In the process, the course aims to help students build skills for listening to, describing, analyzing, and writing about jazz. Assignments involve reading, listening, brief written assignments, two papers, and two exams.

19th-Century Music (MUSICOL 422/522), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                    Prof. Wiley
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 522.
Western Music 1800-1850. The period is viewed through major developments of musical style in works by major European composers. The emphasis will be on music. After a brief review of classical sonata-allegro form, Beethoven’s music will be studied, followed by a review of cultural changes after the Napoleonic wars that opened the way to new directions in German music initiated by Franz Schubert and carrying forward into the so-called romantic generation. Opera will be considered separately, in terms of old repertoire making transitions (Italy and France) or new repertoires taking root (Germany and Russia). Among the works studied are Beethoven’s first ‘Razumovsky’ Quartet and ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, Schubert’s String Quartet in A-minor, Liszt’s First Piano Concerto, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Grading factors will be two midterm and final examinations, and, for those electing MUSICOL 522, an analytical paper on a composition not considered in lecture.

20th-Century Music (MUSICOL 423/523), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                Prof. Fulcher
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 523.
This course both traces and analyzes the evolution of music in the twentieth century, examining major stylistic developments against the background of shifting or competing aesthetic, ideological, social, and political currents. Central to the course is a consideration of “modernism,” and whether it is synonymous with twentieth-century music, but the course will also interrogate how to define modernism’s beginnings in music as well as its different stages of progression, including postmodernism. The class will consist of formal lectures as well as class discussions of readings and of specific musical works. There will be two large writing assignments as well as two major listening exams.

The Art Song (MUSICOL 424/524), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                                        Staff
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 524.

Music in the United States (MUSICOL 450/550), 3 cr. hrs.                                                      Prof. Clague
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 550.
The goals of the course are (1) to survey musical activity in what is now the United States of America, from the 1500s and extending to the present; (2) to examine the function of music in American life; and (3) by placing students into the role of historians, to encourage a critical engagement with facts and their interpretation. Recognizing that courses on American classical music, jazz, rock and roll, musical theatre, and African American music are already taught in the School of Music, and that many American genres are part of virtually every student's experience, the instructor has designed this course with the hope of illuminating connections among these and other kinds of American music, as well as links among the musical traditions of Europe, Africa, and North America. By looking at the whole of American music history in a single course, we can observe continuities and disjunctions that might otherwise go unnoticed. This course will use UM emeritus professor Richard Crawford’s trade book, America’s Musical Life: A History. Taking performance, rather than composition, as its primary focus, the book examines five centuries of music making on the North American continent. Course work will include reading, close listening, writing, discussion, a class recital, and projects, including an oral history interview for the LivingMusic website of the School’s American Music Institute. Students will present their interpretative work in short papers and select from a range of options for a final, original research project to be presented in a poster format on the last day of class. There will be two exams.

Renaissance Music (MUSICOL 478/578), 3 cr. hrs.                                                               Prof. Mengozzi
Graduate students elect MUSICOL 578.
The course focuses on European music of the 15th and 16th centuries. Its goal is to lead students to develop a critical and historical understanding of the musical life of this period and of the placement of this repertory into the contexts of Renaissance culture and of Western music history. To achieve this purpose we will not only take a close look at musical works, genres, styles, forms, composers, etc., but we will also study the political, religious and social institutions that contributed to creating such a flourishing musical culture. Issues of performance practice (such as ornamentation, improvisation, and musica ficta) will be central to the course.

Introduction to Graduate Studies (MUSICOL 501), 3 cr. hrs.                                               Prof. Fulcher
This pro-seminar is intended to prepare both musicologists and ethnomusicologists for graduate work in their fields and, as such, will concentrate on both practical and substantive, or methodological issues. It traces the evolution of both fields, chronologically as well as by nation, examining the seminal texts within their historical and intellectual contexts. After tracing the evolution of the questions and methodologies in both areas, it examines contemporary theoretical currents as well as their application in specific scholarly works. In order to develop research as well as writing skills it includes extensive bibliographic work as well as a series of papers intended to foster not only technical skills but a greater knowledge of the methodologies as well as the issues in both musicology and ethnomusicology.

Music Bibliography (MUSICOL 503), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                      Prof. Reynolds

Teaching an Introduction to Music (MUSICOL 509), 2 cr. hrs.                                              Prof. Stein
Open to all graduate students in music. This is a pedagogy course, and doctoral students may elect it to satisfy their pedagogy requirement. The goal of the course is to help students develop good classroom skills and strategies for teaching introductory courses in music to non-music students (teaching active listening skills to less experienced listeners). Students will be asked to engage with music of all kinds, write short prose exercises about music, and give class presentations on a weekly basis.

Special Course: The Ethnography of World Music (MUSICOL 605), 3 cr. hrs.                     Prof. Castro
Ethnography is one of the primary pursuits of the fields of ethnomusicology and anthropology. This course examines ethnography as a multifaceted methodology for research, the subsequent problem of textualizing those experiences, and how ethnomusicologists deal with issues specific to the subject of music. The class will involve heavy amounts of reading as well as exercises in writing creatively. Students in this class should have strong musical experience prior to enrolling.

Studies in Medieval Music: Music in Christian Liturgies through 1750
(MUSICOL 604), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                                                           Prof. Borders
This seminar will examine the development of Christian liturgies from earliest records through the maturity of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, examining the place of music in worship services from late antiquity into early modernity. In addition to reading and listening assignments, which will be discussed in class, students should expect to write two substantial papers on mutually agreed-upon topics. Knowledge of Latin and modern European languages would be a plus, but is not essential to success in this class.

Studies in Music of the U.S.: Music in Detroit (MUSICOL 650), 3 cr. hrs.                             Prof. Clague
While the story of Motown and its founder Berry Gordy has been told repeatedly, Detroit’s musical history still hides a treasure trove of great music and fascinating tales waiting to be discovered. Much remains to be explored concerning Detroit’s classical, blues, jazz, rock, and techno/electronic scenes. For example, the histories of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival and the Detroit International Jazz Festival have yet to be written and even some aspects of Motown remain unaddressed. All but untouched by scholars is the Ann Arbor Bentley Historical Library’s collection of the papers of John and Leni Sinclair, who managed rock’s prototype punk band—Detroit’s MC5. The Detroit Public Library’s music collection also offers a prime site for original work on local soundscapes, especially the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. While UM will bring some of Detroit’s music history to Ann Arbor in the form of class visitors, this seminar will also require travel to Detroit. Each student in this intensive research course will take on an original research project connected to Detroit’s music history and the class will make several organized field trips to the city, the first of which will be to attend the Labor Day weekend jazz festival (Aug. 29 & Sept. 1—just prior to the start of classes). Research results will be published on the web as part of a Detroit Music History website.

Seminar in Ethnomusicology (MUSICOL 748), 3 cr. hrs.                                                             Prof. Lam
This seminar will examine musical globalization, emphasizing basic dichotomies: continuity and change, localism and cosmopolitanism, national/cultural and ethnic/individual identities, and so forth. The first part of the seminar will read current studies critically and extensively. The second part will focus on case studies and students' term projects.

Winter semester 2008

Special Course: Les Six and Jeune France in Inter-War Paris (MUSICOL 405/505), 3 cr. hrs.          

Graduate students elect MUSICOL 505.                                                                                    Prof. Fulcher

This course will explore two successive generations of composers in inter-war France, examining their musical styles and innovations within their broader aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts.  It will begin with the group "Les Six," which emerged in the early 1920s and included Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey. The course will then move on to consider the very different political, cultural, and musical context of the 1930s in Europe as the background against which to understand the formation and new spiritual goals of the group "Jeune France," which included most prominently Olivier Messiaen and André Jolivet. There will be weekly lectures, discussions of readings and reports as well as essay and listening tests.

Special Course: Beethoven and the Sonata II ( MUSICOL 406/506),  3 cr. hrs.               Prof. Whiting

Graduate students elect MUSICOL 506.

The premise of the course is that Beethoven's keyboard sonatas, solo and accompanied, form a body of work worth studying as a whole (as opposed to the usual practice of isolating the solo sonatas), The course will therefore treat nearly all of Beethoven's chamber music involving piano, from the piano quartets of 1785 to the last solo sonata, Op. 111. The winter semester will pick up where the fall semester left off (hopefully ca. Op. 28), Emphasis will fall on the analysis and interpretation of finished works (rather than on compositional genesis), The main textbook will be Charles Rosen, Beethoven's Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion, to be supplemented by Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life, James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory (on reserve), and the instructor's ongoing translation of Jürgen Uhde's Beethovens Klaviermusik (available on CTools), among other readings. Grades will be based on in-class participation (performance will be encouraged), analytical essays (two for undergraduates, three for grad students), and (if need be) a final examination. The course is designed for undergraduates and graduates in music; undergraduates must have completed the music history core.

Special Course: The Music of Johannes Brahms  (MUSICOL 407/507),  3 cr. hrs.             Prof. Wiley

Graduate students elect MUSICOL 507.

This 3-credit course is a selected survey of the music of Brahms, taking into account the genres to which he made significant contributions, together with the trajectory of his general style from youth to old age, and occasional context in the form of comparisons with the music of his contemporaries. Preparation for class involves study of the music in advance of lectures, including an understanding of the words of texted pieces. There will be two midterm examinations and a final examination, at which attendance is required—prospective students should confirm, in advance, their availability on examination dates. In addition, graduate students electing the course will be assigned to analyze a work of Brahms, the choice of which will involve conferral with the instructor, in a paper of 10-15 pages.

Special Course: Instrumental Music of the Renaissance  (MUSICOL 408/508),  3 cr. hrs.                   

Graduate students elect MUSICOL 508.                                                                                Prof. Mengozzi

This course will concentrate on the repertory and performance practices of instrumental ensembles in the period 1450-1600, particularly wind bands. We will also study the repertory for solo instruments, such as lute and keyboard. Readings and assignments will deal with topics such as improvisation, tuning, arrangements of vocal music, manuscript and printed sources of instrumental music. A number of instruments from the Stearns Collection (copies of original instruments) will be available to those students who wish to take a hands-on approach to the subject. It is hoped that in-class performances on these instruments will be a routine part of the course. There are no pre-requisites for this class apart from having completed the MUSICOLogy 139-240 core sequence.

History of Opera 19th-20th Centuries ( MUSICOL 414/514), 3 cr. hrs.                                  Prof. Geary

Graduate students elect MUSICOL 514.

This course provides an overview of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western operatic repertoire by considering roughly two dozen operas from Rossini to Philip Glass. Its aim is to highlight significant developments in the genre by exploring these operas within a broad musical, cultural, and historical framework.  At the center of this exploration will be basic questions surrounding the relationship between music and drama as well as the manner in which this relationship has been approached by composers at different times and coming from diverse national or regional operatic traditions.  Grading for this course will be based on class participation, two exams, and a research paper to be undertaken in consultation with the instructor.

Topics in Baroque Music (MUSICOL 420/520), 3 cr. hrs.                                                           Prof. Stein

Graduate students elect MUSICOL 520.

This course is designed as an overview of selected topics in music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (roughly 1570-1750), but it is not designed as a strict survey of Baroque music.  Particular emphasis will be given to the invention and definition of musical genres, the relationship of music to text, and the place and function of music (secular and sacred, vocal and instrumental, for court, chamber, church, and theater) in early modern society. In addition to studying music by such composers as Monteverdi, Schütz, Lully, Corelli, Vivaldi, Handel, and J. S. Bach, we will also include a special unit on music from Spain and its Latin American colonies in the 17th and early 18th centuries.  This course also introduces students to writings about music, musical sources, aesthetic theories of the period, and some issues of performing practice. Music will be considered as cultural and artistic expression in its historical framework. The work of this course consists of listening, score study, and reading. We will discuss the music in class, in some detail. Class attendance is required. Grades will be based on written work and class participation. MUSICOLogy 420 may be used as an upper-level writing course, with permission of the instructor.

Music in the United States (MUSICOL 450/550),  3 cr. hrs.                                                    Prof. Clague

Graduate students elect MUSICOL 550.

Music in the United States is a lecture-discussion class open to both undergraduates and graduate students. The goal of the course is three-fold: it offers an overview of musical activity in what is now the United States of America, from the 1500s to the present; secondly, this survey examines the function of music in American life; finally, the course endeavors to place students into the role of historians to encourage a critical engagement with primary materials and their interpretation. Recognizing that courses on American classical music, jazz, rock and roll, musical theatre, and African American music are already taught in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and that many American genres are part of virtually every student's experience, the instructor has designed this course with the hope of illuminating connections among these and other kinds of American music, as well as links among the musical traditions of Europe, Africa, Latin America, and North America. By looking at the whole of American music history in a single course, we can observe continuities and disjunctions that might otherwise go unnoticed. This course will use UM emeritus professor Richard Crawford’s textbook, An Introduction to America’s Music, and its accompanying CD set. Taking performance, rather than composition, as its primary focus, the book examines five centuries of music making on the North American continent. We will supplement the book with a set of primary source readings that will serve as a springboard for discussion. Course work will include reading, close listening, musical and cultural analysis, discussion, class performances, and group projects, including an oral history interview for the Living Music website of the School’s American Music Institute. Students will present their interpretive work in short papers and select from a range of options for a final, original research project.

Medieval Music (MUSICOL 477/577), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                     Prof. Borders

Graduate students elect MUSICOL 577.

This lecture / discussion course will examine devotional and secular music composed and performed between 700-1400 C.E. It will be organized around the five most important sites of medieval musical activity—the monastery, the castle, the cathedral, the urban fair, and the palace. Students will be asked to prepare for lectures and follow-up discussions by completing assigned reading (on reserved and on the web) and listening assignments (on-line and on reserve). They should expect two 15-20-page papers (topics to be developed with the instructor) and two essay examinations at mid-term and final. This course is intended for upper division music undergraduates (400 level) and music graduate students (500 level); familiarity with modern musical notation will be assumed.

Special Course: Arts, Patrons, Courts in Early Modern Culture (MUSICOL 505.002/605), 3 cr. hrs.

meets together with HISTART 689.003 and ROMLANG 500)                                                  Prof. Stein

Note: enrollment limited to twelve.                                                                                                                       

This course is a seminar devoted to exploring the role of private patrons, institutional patronage, and the commercial market-place in the production of works of music and art.  It is designed for graduate students interested in reading and writing about the patronage and production of music, the visual arts, architecture, and theater in the early modern period, as well as studying pieces of music and works of art. The course is open to scholars and performers. We will explore the role of individual patrons and institutional patronage, public and private, in early modern societies, through careful case-studies of patrons, producers, artists, and performers, male and female, in selected times and places. Our work seeks to better understand systems of production as well as the variability and complexity of relationships between patrons/producers and artists/composers/performers in Europe and Latin America in the period roughly 1500-1750.

Our first set of readings will include groundbreaking patronage studies from our several disciplines, as well as readings concerned with methodology, theories of patronage and production, the economics of the arts, and the politics of the arts in early modern society.  Following this initial period of general readings, the course will be organized around particular times and places (along with relevant musical, theatrical, and artistic repertories), with readings from successful case studies. Students will be introduced to and have the chance to work with various kinds of primary sources---archival documents (inventories, notarial documents, household accounts, private letters, etc.), printed texts, theatrical manuscripts, musical scores, images, and so on. Our understanding will be enriched by several guest presentations by MEMS faculty on their own case studies. Our work will focus on Florence (and possibly other Northern Italian centers), Rome, Naples, Versailles and Paris, Madrid, Lima, and London, with possible study of other sites, depending on student interest and linguistic preparation. The work of the course will include assigned readings, listening (and score study for those in music), study of visual images, literary texts, and so on. Attendance and class participation are required.

Special Course: Approaches to Cultural History and The Cultural History of Music

(MUSICOL 506/606), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                                                      Prof. Fulcher

How does one write the history of a musical, artistic, or other cultural object?  What are the historical premises, intellectual goals, and theoretical foundations that underlie such studies?  More specifically, how do we integrate the diachronic and synchronic dimensions, or the internal developments with the language or field with forces extraneous to it from other cultural areas or from social and political developments around it? This seminar, which will be primarily a reading and discussion course, will begin by considering these questions from the perspective of the great cultural historians of the past—from the 19th to the early 20th century, and will then trace the more recent developments in the field—the influence of the "Annales school," of symbolic anthropology, of the "linguistic turn"--and other currents that have had an impact on such studies in the past several decades.  It will then turn to the examination of how these developments have been reflected in MUSICOLogy and ethnoMUSICOLogy in recent years, particularly as MUSICOLogy has once again attempted to reintegrate music into the larger "cultural landscape,"  premised upon the belief that music can both illuminate this context and can itself be further illuminated by it.

Introduction to Ethnomusicology (MUSICOL 547),  3 cr. hrs.                                                   Prof. Lam

This course will examine ethnomusicology issues and methodology in two stages. The first will survey seminal publications of the discipline. The second will focus on current debates on music as a discourse. Students will be required to critically read a substantial amount of ethnomusicological publications.

Studies in the Music of the U.S.: "American Music and National Identity" (MUSICOL 650), 3 cr. hrs.                                                                                                                                                                  Prof. Garrett

This seminar centers on the topic of national identity as applied to and expressed by music of the United States.  The course covers a wide spectrum of music-making, ranging from Amy Beach and Charles Ives to George Clinton and Los Lobos.  Students will gain familiarity with scholarship on musical nationalism and learn to apply these varied methods.  While the course centers on American music, its theoretical scope is designed to be useful for specialists in other musical traditions.  Coursework includes reading, listening, short response papers, class discussion, and a research paper.

Seminar in Ethnomusicology: “Music, Ecstasy and the Brain” MUSICOL 748, 3 cr. hrs.

                                                                                                                                                       Prof. Becker         

This course will explore the phenomenon of musical ecstasy from the perspectives of cultural context, musical structures, the phenomenology of ecstasy, and the neurophysiology of ecstasy. The course will include readings from neuroscience, ethnomusicology, psychology, and anthropology as well as readings on the specific rituals to be discussed. The specific rituals that will be included in the syllabus are 1) Sufi Muslim ceremonies from Pakistan and North India, 2) a Hindu ceremony from Bali, Indonesia, and 3) a Pentecostal Christian liturgy from Michigan. Students interested in the intersection between music, emotion and neuroscience are particularly welcome. Students will be graded on class participation, weekly papers, listening quizzes, and a final paper.

Colloquium in Ethnomusicology (MUSICOL 760), 3 cr. hrs.                                                 Prof. Becker

In the winter semester, this course is focused on current issues in the discipline of Ethnomusicology. Each week we read a current article or book chapter and discuss the content and the issues raised in each reading. There are no papers or exams, but students are expected to participate actively in discussions. This course is required for graduate students in Ethnomusicology. Other students with some background and a keen interest in the intellectual issues of the field are also welcome by permission of instructor.

Vietnamese Music Ensemble SEAS [South East Asian Studies] 450, 2 cr. hrs.                        Dr. Phong

Dr. Nguyen Thuyet Phong, Instructor

This is a special one-semester ensemble course offered through the Center for World Performance Studies and hosted by the Department of Musicology. It is designed to teach beginning students the basics of performing Vietnamese traditional and folk music.  Students will learn to play any of three instruments, the dan bau (monochord), dan tranh (seventeen-stringed zither) and dan nguyet (moon-shaped lute), both individually and as part of an ensemble. No experience with Vietnamese music or language is required and students of all disciplines are welcome to join.

MUSICOLOGY COURSES FOR NON-MUSIC MAJORS AND LS&A MUSIC CONCENTRATORS

Special Course: Music in Medieval Culture (MUSICOL 131),  3 cr. hrs.                          Prof. Borders

Some scholars argue that music not only influences our perceptions of the contemporary world, but also serves to construct it through social messages the music encodes. This lecture / discussion class seeks to adapt this way of thinking to the music and social rituals of the Middle Ages. Focusing on five sites of medieval musical activity—the monastery, the castle, the cathedral, the urban fair, and the palace–participants will examine the music as well as medieval and modern discourses surrounding it. Students will be asked to prepare for discussions by completing reading, web-based visual, and on-line listening assignments. They should expect two 12-15-page papers and two essay examinations at mid-term and final. This introductory course is intended for non-music majors; familiarity with modern musical notation is not expected.

Special Course: “Revolutionary” Opera ( MUSICOL 305),  3 cr. hrs.                                  Prof. Wiebe

Visiting Prof. Heather Wiebe (hwiebe@umich.edu)

This course looks at 19th-century opera through the lens of political revolution. From Beethoven’s Fidelio to Verdi’s Don Carlos, the 19th-century operatic stage was full of political intrigue, and peopled by tyrants, enslaved communities, and insurgent heroes. We will look closely at a small group of operas in the context of French, German, and Italian revolutionary politics, thinking carefully about the links between the operatic stage and the world of political action. Readings will include sources on individual operas as well as more general historical and literary studies. Under the broad theme of revolution, we will address topics such as gender and the revolutionary hero, representations of kingship, citizenship, landscape, nostalgia, and constructions of the crowd. The course will also provide an introduction to 19th-century operatic forms and conventions. Evaluation will be based on participation and three short papers. (This course is for non-music majors and fulfills the third-year writing requirement for music concentrators in LSA.)