Module Catalogue 2024/25

Pre Requisite Comment

N/A

Co Requisite Comment

N/A

Aims

- To provide an introduction to the academic study of music at UG level;
- To extend students’ knowledge of European music histories;
- To increase awareness of the issues and methodologies involved in the study of music history;
- To provide a platform for the study of historical-cultural options later in the UG degree programmes.

Outline Of Syllabus

This module will introduce you to the challenges of studying music(s) from the past. You will be introduced to a range of scholarly approaches to European music(s) of the past. This introduction to historical method (sometimes called historiography) will be grounded by looking at a number of specific case studies. In the past, these have included chant and liturgy in pre-modern Europe, music in late Renaissance Italy, music in early modern England, the rise of opera from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Romanticism and nineteenth-century European art music, vernacular music and colonialism, Austro-German Opera at the Long Fin de Siecle, and twentieth-century modernism and postmodernism.

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

- an understanding of scholarly approaches to history
- insight into the historical context – social, political, institutional, cultural – of evolving musical languages, styles and practices
- an awareness of key moments in Western music history

Intended Skill Outcomes

- research techniques (including internet and library skills and independent engagement with primary sources)
- critical evaluation of the ideas of others
- communication and organisation of your own ideas

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures are given by a team of staff members; each lecture topic introduces a new area of study (repertory/context/methodology). Weekly small-group workshops give students the opportunity to enrich the contents of lectures and to ask the lecturer questions around the topic. The workshops include primary source work, seminar discussions and Q&As.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

Essay 1 tests your ability to produce a piece of written work dealing directly with primary sources and incorporating some additional self-directed research.

Essay 2 tests your ability to undertake a larger piece of research based on one of the topics presented in the lectures, and to prepare a piece of written work over the course of several weeks. It gives you the opportunity to do further reading and to explore one of the topics in greater depth. Essay 2 builds on the primary source work you have done in Essay 1, and requires you to engage closely with primary source materials for your chosen topic.

General Notes

n/a