GRMUS 680T — Organicism and Music

2 credits
Spring
Steven Laitz

Music is often viewed as an organism that exists in time, beginning as a seed and growing through variation and expansion akin to a plant’s metamorphosis—concepts which today are called motives and transformations. This idea made a remarkable impact in the late 18^th century and well into the 19^th century; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), a central figure in the notion of organicism and metamorphosis, held that the small is to the large as the large is to the whole, a conviction based on this philosophy. Through an examination of works by composers from Beethoven through Brahms to early Schoenberg, this course will explore music within the framework of organicism—how a composition depends on a seed planted at the outset of the work, which germinates and is transformed throughout. That such changed repetition exists in time allows the performer to comprehend the composition as a living, vitally unfolding process, and carries profound performative implications.