Courses Offered in Fall 2022 (111AY 1S)

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.
(以上皆參照原金立群教授的內容)

This course offers an overview to Western art music from late Baroque to 1876, the year Wagner’s Ring was premiered. We will incorporate the music history of this period in the larger context of social and cultural developments, including the developments of aesthetics and technology. The goal of this course is twofold. Functioning as a remedial course, it offers graduate music students without sufficient knowledge in the history of Western art music a factual and conceptual grounding. Equally importantly, it approaches music as a cultural phenomenon, partaking and “bouncing back,” as an active force, to what was happening in social reforms, political upheavals, and innovations in technology and industry, including the inventions of music instruments, music devices, as well as well stagecraft, lighting, sound, and space.

This 3-credit seminar, which would be instructed primarily in English, explores vision in 19th-century optical science, medical studies, technology, literature, and the arts, including music. In this era, an improved understanding of the eye in both ophthalmology and optical science spread into the interpretation of vision, including confused vision, in literature, public entertainment history, visual arts, and music. A reserved and even skeptical approach to visual perception became a source of inspiration for authors, composers, and artists to convey this sensory confusion with metaphors, techniques, and modes of expression. This also leads to their attention to other senses, especially the senses of hearing and touch. In theatre and drama, developments in space, light, and staging also coincide with and likely contributed to this new aesthetics of seeing. Understanding visual culture thus may offer and fresh and more comprehensive way to understand how inventions in the arts and literature related to science.

This course will be divided into 3 parts. In Part I, we start with new theories, discoveries, and optical devices in both optical science and ophthalmology, which we will study hand in hand with music works, in which vision likely inspired new techniques, acoustics, and instrumentation. In Part II, we delve into literature and visual arts, in which confused vision served as important metaphors and the basis of different techniques and modes of expression. We will consider how and why authors and artists found a manipulated vision appealing from an aesthetic standpoint, and how that also inspired them to shift their attention to other senses and psychology. Part III, we explore vision relative to the use of space, lighting, and staging in the opera and public entertainment. We will study renowned optical illusion in magic shows, including their mechanical aspects, their inventors, and their reception. We will also study inventions in theatrical lighting and acoustic space hand in hand with European theatres and opera houses, relating visual culture to architecture, staging, and dramaturgy.

Most readings for the course are in English and will require the ability to read a music score and to do music analysis. Music literacy is therefore required. Undergraduate students are not recommended to take this course for credits but are welcome to sit in as auditors.