Courses Offered in Fall 2023 (112AY 1S)

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.

Two quizzes focusing on repertoire building and score-reading will take place in mid- and end of the term.

Course Overview and Objectives

This is a remedial course that primarily introduces the development of Western music from 1877 to the modern era. The course content is divided into four main stages:

1. From the invention of the phonograph in 1877 to the collapse of tonality at the end of the nineteenth century.
2. The development and construction of non-tonal music in the early twentieth century.
3. Musical developments since World War II in 1945 and the use of electroacoustic technology.
4. Contemporary musical trends and the integration of developmental contexts in the twenty-first century.

Through this course, students are expected to integrate the complex and interwoven relationships in musical development since the late nineteenth century, and to understand the developmental contexts of music over the past century. This understanding will support students in multiple areas, including the application of compositional techniques, the grasp of performance interpretation, and the study of relationships between musical events and society in musicological research.