GRMUS H660 — Music, Performing, and the Public

This course surveys the complex intersections between compositions, performing musicians, and public audiences from a broad historical perspective that runs from roughly the 16th to the 19th century. We will discuss the reception of European music in America, the rise of public opera and concert cultures, and the changing status of the musical work throughout these developments. The course will be primarily discussion based: students will situate their own performative experiences within the historical developments studied. Some questions we will ask are, how does recognizing the performer’s “voice” change or complicate music history’s conventional understanding of the work? Consequently, how does the work pose a challenge to the emergence of the performer’s voice? What is the audience’s role in this conversation, both today and in the historic moment of the work’s conception? And finally, how does the performing body emerge as a point in which these issues converge, and how might it be a tool for understanding music?