110 學年第 2 學期 開設課程

Whether in the building of instruments and concert halls or theoretical and aesthetic systems, music has always been interdisciplinary between technology and the humanities. Even when music asserted the status of an independent and autonomous art—“absolute music”—at the end of the 18th century, it was neither isolated from Enlightenment ideas nor political and industrial revolutions of that time. Music historiography has long taken the absolute music paradigm for granted, focusing mostly on masterworks and their masters. But detached from its social and technological contexts, music could be no more than “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” This course aims to reconnect the art of music with technology and society, and takes its departure after the 1876 premiere of Richard Wagner’s monumental _Ring_ tetralogy in the custom-built and court-funded Bayreuth theater, which could be taken as the summation of European music culture. With the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in 1877, music has entered what Walter Benjamin calls the “age of technological reproducibility,” when the production, transmission and reception of music was profoundly transformed. A chronological narrative of that transformation will be attempted here; the first half is a broader survey, the second spotlights on selective topics with more global perspective. Though compact and selective, this course should enable the students to understand the ebb and flow of music history within this time frame, and cultivate a critical sense to think about the meaning and value of musical creativity in the contexts of technological innovations and social restructuring.