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Through intensive reading and guided independent research, students acquire deepened understanding and beginner's research skills as relevant to music before 1800.
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This course examines a selected topic or a small group of topics and methodologies currently relevant in research concerning music before 1800. The course reconstructs (parts of) the musical repertoire and the music cultures of (late) medieval and/or renaissance Europe as transmitted to us in a wide range of sources, many of which seem befuddling at first. We start with an introduction to the basics of early-music notation and learn how “music” was conceptualized in pre-modern Europe. We then expand to include narrative, visual and documentary evidence allowing us to place music and sounds in the appropriate historical and social contexts. Particular attention will be placed on the texts and para-texts directly accompanying the music that we study. In addition to highlighting the ceremonial and dramatic functions of pre-modern music in both the sacred and the secular spheres, we pay close attention to the exchange of musical ideas, the use of musical notation and other methods of transmission, the role of music patronage, and technologies of memory, book-making, and print in a predominantly oral culture. Topics examined in this course in the past include musical riddles, the medieval song and its links to the courtly love ethos, the problematic relationship between humans and animals in late medieval music theory, and how medieval authors conceptualized animals.
Career orientation:
Training in written and oral presentation of research.
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