GRMUS H629 — One City - Ten Years

This course will involve a multifaceted investigation of music and music-making within particular cities during specific ten-year spans.  Each student will choose one ten-year period in a single city, anywhere in the world, to explore intensively for the semester, first studying the history, politics, and social mores of the chosen period and city, and then focusing in on contemporaneous developments in the arts and cultural life. Through reading firsthand accounts and literature, listening to music, studying performance practices, and viewing artwork, theater, dance, and films (if after 1900), the student will become a master of the arts in his/her chosen years and city. The research will necessarily be conducted independently, with weekly presentations in class on the student’s discoveries, and incremental writing assignments that will culminate in a final, comprehensive report.  By considering musical composition and performance within the artistic, social and political contexts of a specific time and place, and sharing their findings with one another, students should come to appreciate that music is a richly integral product of its environment and age, and be more curious about and attuned to the conditions that shaped the creation of all the music they perform.