GRMUS 634H — Music and the Museum

2 credits
Fall
Elizabeth Weinfield

This course will explore the complex intersections between music history, iconography, and performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Using the Met Museum as our interlocutor for the semester, we will engage with subjects such as musical iconography, object history, materialism, immateriality, and performance to reassess the notion of the music museum as a space for critical inquiry. Together we will ask how we can enrich our understanding of the music we value through a study of music’s material culture. How can objects that interact with music history inform our work as scholar-performers? What does it mean to approach concert curation in the multi-voiced soundscape of the Met Museum, an institution with a long history of performance? During select visits to the museum, we will learn from curators, conservators, and concert presenters as we work to research and curate site-specific concert programs of our own. Readings will draw from the digital humanities, performance art, musical iconography, the new organology, and critical theory.