Courses Offered in Spring 2024 (112AY 2S)

This graduate course introduces research methods, as well as the strategies and the “language” of writing about music to performance majors. We start with a brief review of the basics of research venues, tools, and crucial issues in and ethics of academic writing. We continue with a series of sample writings hand in hand with these principles. We will see how the authors focus on different aspects of perspectives in their discussion of music and how they develop and sharpen their arguments.

The aim of this course is to offer graduate music majors necessary tools and directions to engage in an intelligent discussion of their repertory, skills that they may apply to their term projects, thesis writing, and lecture recitals. We will have two invited music scholars coming to discuss the ways that they phrase they theories arguments. The selected sample writings will enable us to see the variety of ways that an author may use to approach a music work.
In addition to our weekly discussion, short assignments, and quiz(zes), each student will function as a discussion leader in a class session; sign-up sheet will be distributed by week 4. At the end of the term, the class will be divided into several groups. Each group will present a chosen article or book chapter, discussing how the author’s approach to music and the pros and cons of this writing relate to the principles and basics that we have discussed earlier in the semester.

課程概述與目標：This course is designed for music majors at graduate level. Prior knowledge of the repertory, styles, and genres of music is required. English will be primary language for instruction; Mandarin will be incorporated for the explanation of more complex ideas and during the discussion between the instructor and the students. We focus on a selection of popular topics in the scholarship of mid-late 18th-century music, often known as Classic music. Despite the brevity of this period in music history, its association with culture and politics is as extremely important. Our aim is to explore in depth how and to what extent major historical events, important movements and trends, and the issues that appealed to the intellectual, related to the development music in this era.

We will spend the first third of the semester on the idea of rationality, a key concept in the Enlightenment, including how it was contested in music and drama. We continue with the impact of French Revolution on the work by Cherubini, a crucial figure at the time and who is often overshadowed in history by the more well-known composers based in Vienna, namely, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. W8-12 is devoted to the reading of Classic style, the complex definition of nature in relationship to the castrato, and the opera buffa in the context of Vienna. Whereas specific composers and works stand out more obviously, our focus will be the ways in which the cultural contexts associated to and left an impact on the development of these figures and works.

We will conclude with a selection of some of the most popular music treatises and pedagogical manuals that circulated in this era and are still much studied today. Created by the major musicians and pedagogues of the time, these sources reveal the discussion of music from on a technical level and the reasoning of playing these instruments in certain ways. These music “DIY”s also suggest how, by this time, the correct execution of these instruments was considered a knowledge worth sharing with a larger and increasingly literate public.

教科書（請註明書名、作者、出版社、出版年等資訊）：

The readings for each week are either posted on the course website or can be accessed on the university library’s collection of electronic resources (for example, JSTOR). Readings that provide some background information related to each week’s topic will come from the following sources: Daniel Heartz, Music in the Age of Enlightenment, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music (2009), and Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History.

The topics of this seminar include literature reading, music analysis, and performance practice. Through multiple methods the students will be able to research the performance of music styles from the 16th to 18th centuries and explore the art of Authentic Performance.