MHMUS 489 — Music Across Media: From Orpheus to Nintendo

3 credits
Spring
Edgardo Salinas

This course explores the history of classical music across different media, from early adaptations of the Orpheus myth in opera to contemporary remediations of symphonic music in videogames. The class starts by dissecting the modern notions of medium, media, and technology in their specific relation to sound and music. To investigate the shifting relationship between sound and media, we will focus on a group of representative musical works that will serve as case studies as we follow their adaptation to different types of aesthetic media, including opera, theater, radio, film, television, and digital games. Case studies will involve Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth Symphonies, Puccini’s La bohème, Chopin’s Nocturnes, Wagner’s Ring cycle, and Verdi’s La traviata, as well as original soundtracks from popular videogames. The course concludes by taking stock of the new possibilities that digital media and technologies have opened up for the dissemination of music and contemplate their untapped potential for the future of the music industry writ large within the media ecosystems of the Digital Age.