Western Music History
This survey course explores the history of Western art music composed or conceived during the so-called Antiquity, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic periods, and the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. It introduces students to different musical ideas, traditions, genres, styles, composers, and compositions of each historical era. By integrating listening, performance, and discussion activities, it encourages students to interpret musical works and practices in light of their cultural, social, intellectual, and political contexts from diverse perspectives.
Research Methods in Music
This course introduces students to different research methodologies in music, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Students will gain foundational knowledge and skills to pursue research in various areas of musical disciplines, specifically in the area of historical musicology. Students will grow in their ability to identify research gap, develop research questions, review relevant literature, create research plans, locate primary and secondary resources, collect and analyse data, and report research findings in the form of writing and presentations. Each student will write and submit a research proposal on a topic of his or her choice.
Introduction to Musical Aesthetics
This course explores different ideas and concepts of musical aesthetics from Ancient Greece to the present. Key figures include, but are not limited to, Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William Hogarth, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Hanslick, Hans von Bülow, Ernst Pauer, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kivy, Roger Scruton, Jerrold Levinson, and others. Working at the intersection of music, history, and philosophy, students will reflect on the nature, meaning, and value of beauty and aesthetic judgment in music. Students will have the opportunity to develop their personal aesthetic philosophies of music.
Sensibility and Eighteenth-Century Music
“Sensibility,” which refers to the capacity to feel and be moved, dominated the eighteenth century as a concept of moral, aesthetic, literary, social, religious, and physiological dimensions. As more and more historians recognize the Enlightenment was not merely an age of reason but also one that emphasized sensibility, this course explores sensibility’s relationship to musical works, ideas, and practices based on primary texts and sources. It interrogates musicology’s tendency to reduce sensibility into a historical period, style, and topic in topic theory and examines sensibility as a culture, including its continuous manifestations in nineteenth-century music, framed in light of relevant musical discourses centered on the ideas of emotions and subjectivity. In recognizing the value of sensibility, students will also have the opportunity to reflect on the role of sensibility in everyday listening and performance.
Buzzing: Bug Music
Insects have throughout human history captured the imagination of many artists. In terms of literature of the past century, one may think of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). But composers and musicians, too, have been drawn to the sounds and movements of insects. The academic and musician David Rothenberg, author of Bug Music (2014), would make music with insects in nature. Rothenberg argues insects are “our original teachers of rhythm” and that our sense of rhythm was derived partly from insect sounds, which offer “scads of regular beats, sometimes exactly in sync, sometimes slightly off—irregular, overlapping, forming complex polyrhythms, sometimes by accident, at other times by evolved design.” This course explores music inspired by bugs and insects, ranging from Josquin des Prez’s El Grillo (The Cricket), Edward Grieg’s “Butterfly” from Lyric Pieces Op. 43, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” from the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Kalevi Aho’s Symphony No. 7 “Insect Symphony” to many more lesser-known pieces and songs, delving into their musical materials, motifs, and meaning. As ecomusicology gains ground in musicology, students interested in music’s relationship to nature or the ecosystem will also be encouraged to conduct relevant research.
(Upcoming) Music: Culture-Making and Storytelling
“Without music,” the philosopher Nietzsche once said, “life would be a mistake.” While not everyone is skilled and trained in music, music does permeate our everyday life. Music has the power to provoke emotions, convey feelings, communicate ideas, create human bonds, preserve memories, and shape identities. What we listen to often reveal our religious and philosophical worldviews, and our preferences may indicate not only our aesthetic judgment, as taste, but also our moral, social, and cultural values. Building on these ideas, this course explores music’s place and functions in different cultures and civilisations as culture-making, storytelling, memory, and metaphor. Drawing on examples from various musical styles and genres of contrasting historical and geographical contexts, it looks at music of joy, lament, hope, love, and faith, all ideas or ideals fundamental to many cultural traditions. By evaluating their personal experience and exploring music that has shaped or captured significant moments in human history, students will further reflect on music’s power to both change or transform individuals and societies and represent or reinforce individual and collective identities, considered also in light of the increased use of digital platforms and streaming services. Students will become more aware of how music can mould and reflect cultures, serving also as a means for humans to express and interpret our social experience and existence.