Courses Offered in Spring 2022 (110AY 2S)

Our main tasks are professional and academic writings; the skills involved are bibliographical, analytical, evaluative, and communicative. The aim is to train ourselves to be an up-to-date musician-scholar-intellectual, able to make music and make sense of music creatively and critically.

Our course is designed as a cycle of four stages:

1. RESEARCH MATTERS: We'll start our intellectual journey by "musing" on who we are, what we do, and why we need to do scholarly research. Then we'll learn the craft of thesis-writing thru criticism and methodological reflections.
2. SUBJECT MATTERS: The first subject of research for musician is our CVs and performance portfolio (posters, bios, program lists and notes).
3. STYLE MATTERS: We'll learn to meet our "audience" by written and oral presentations, considering the aspects of form and style.
4. REVIEW MATTERS: Finally, we'll come to present our term project and review what we've accomplished or could be improved. Then we'll preview the perspective of a musician-scholar-intellectual. The journey has just begun ...

On the whole, we'll be doing a lot of thinking, reading, talking and writing, in and out of the classroom. Our TA will arrange with you to hold a weekly group tutorial hour. In addition, please don't hesitate to make an appointment with me at my office hour. Concrete "products" at the end of the semester will be a mini-conference and an anthology of selected written work.

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.

To practice the basic scholarly skills of reading, writing and editing, and to discuss individual research projects of senior students. Two highlights are the preparation of abstracts for TWMF 2022 and the editing/writing of program notes for the institute's chamber recital.

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.

Every student should perform in class by arrangement on a piece of his (her) own choice. Others will provide opinions for discussion.