Topics in mid-late Eighteenth-Century Music: Theory and Practice
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.