Links:
[1] http://www.iesabroad.org/study-abroad/programs/barcelona-liberal-arts-business
[2] http://mediatheque.ircam.fr/articles/textes/McAdams89a/
[3] http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=4.3]
[4] http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=4.3
Introduction To Music: Learning To Listen
This course is a survey of Western musical practice from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. While learning how to develop critical listening skills, the student will explore each different stylistic period, its historical context and certain musical parameters that may be emphasized in the music (pitch, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony, sound, etc). The main goal is to show the student that music has the capacity to codify multiple layers of meaning and how s/he can develop the tools to uncover them. The course is organized in units that pair a musical style or period with particular theoretical or technical concept(s). In addition, these pairs will be discussed in connection to particular historical events or prevalent social currents of the time (in italics).
The list of these units is:
• What is Music? - Properties of Sound – Notation
• Plainchant and Ars Nova – Pitch and Rhythm – Sacred vs. Secular
• Renaissance Polyphony – Harmonic Intervals (and Rhythm) – Rebirth of Man
• Baroque – Tonality – Protestant Reformation
• Classical – Form – Absolutism and Newtonian Physics
• Romanticism – Orchestration – Darwin and Evolution
• Serialism – Emancipation of the Dissonance - Relativity
• Post-serialism and Experimentalism – Emancipation of everything else
Attendance is mandatory for all IES classes, including field studies. Any exams, tests, presentations, or other work missed due to student absences can only be rescheduled in cases of documented medical or family emergencies. If a student misses more than three classes in any course half a letter grade will be deducted from the final grade for every additional absence. Seven absences in any course will result in a failing grade.
By the end of the course, the students are able to:
• identify the main musical movements from the Middle Ages to the present from a technical, social and philosophical point of view.
• uncover the main levels of meaning present in music (syntactical, semantic and ontological).
• Demonstrate the importance and delicate balance of the main forces of music (melody, harmony, counterpoint, timbre, etc).
• connect the conceptual and technical transformation of music to the World in which it exists.
• analyze different ways of hearing, describing, representing and understanding music.
Readings; Listenings; Class discussions; Lectures; Student presentations; Guided concert attendance; Visits to emblematic music venues in Barcelona.
LANGUAGE OF PRESENTATION: English
Class participation (15%); weekly assignments
(25%); presentation (10%); mid-term exam (25%); final project (25%).
• Class Participation: The way of learning a personal way of talking about music is through discussion.
Therefore, both attendance and participation are essential; the lecture should provide a framework and starting point for this discussion.
• Weekly Assignments: These will be mostly précis of articles that are relevant to each unit. These
readings are meant to point the student to related topics or complement the lectures.
• Presentation: Each student will present two pieces: one they like and one they dislike. They will describe them in as much detail as possible incorporating the materials from the lectures, and
present reasons for their preference. Each student will make one presentation during the course.
• Mid-term exam: This will be a combination of aural identification of styles/techniques, definitions of keywords and a choice between two short essay questions. Depending on the material covered, the exam might be split between in-class and take-home.
• Final Project: The final project is an analysis of a piece picked by the student and approved by myself. The analysis aims to present the syntactical, semantic and ontological meanings of the piece. These levels will be uncovered through a series of steps including a phenomenological description, a formal analysis, a map and a visual representation of the sound. These steps will be introduced
during the lectures and as weekly assignments.
Session 1: Introductions and administrative details (syllabus, presentation dates, etc.) What is music and how do we listen to it? Problems with music historical reconstruction (sacred and secular).
Required readings:
Barenboim, Daniel and Said, Eduard W., Parallels and Paradoxes, pg.28-38, Edited by Ara Guzeliman, New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002.
Required listening:
Gregorian chant – Vere dignum
Hildegard of Bingen – Columba aspexit
Session 2: Plainchant and pitch. Singing.
Required readings:
Stravinsky, Igor. “The Phenomenon of Music”, Poetics of Music, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
Required listening:
Perotin – Alleluia. Difusa est gratia
Session 3: Ars antiqua – the separation of composition and performance. Rhythm and its notation. Organum, florid organum, discant, clausulae, etc. Singing and tapping rhythm exercises.
Required readings:
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. “Concepts we Live By”, The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts”, “Metaphorical Systematicity: Highlighting and Hiding”, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980.
Grout, Donald Jay. “Apendix: A typical mass”, A History of Western Music, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Required listening: Perotin – Alleluia. Difusa est gratia
Session 4: Notre Dame school (Leonin and Perotin). Conductus, motet, rhythmic modes.
Required readings:
Grout, Donald Jay. “Notre Dame Organum”, “Polyphonic Conductus”, “The Motet”, A History of Western
Music, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Required listening:
Machaut – Quant a Moi
Session 5: Polyphony – Ars Nova. Introduction to the necessary balance between creativity and control. Crisis in the Church and its effects on music and composers. Escolania de Montserrat (XIV).
Required readings:
Plato. “Republic”, The Collected Dialogues (pg.623-630, 643-648), ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Session 6: Discussion of music history as an asymmetrical oscillation between simplicity and complexity in different dimensions. Ars Nova, with its isorhythms and hockets, marks the end of a wave.
Review of the Middle Ages.
Required readings:
Grout, Donald Jay. “Ars Nova in France”, “Italian Trecento”, “French Music of the Late Fourteenth
Century”, “Chromaticism and Musica Ficta” from A History of Western Music, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Required listening:
Machaut – Quant a moi
Dufay – Ave maris stella
Session 7: What is different from the music of the middle ages? Homophony, sonority, clarity, etc. What does this respond to? If Man is the center of the world, music should be for him and therefore be understandable and address his emotions. Expression in music (open question...) Extract, from the observations, the characteristics of Renaissance music.
Required readings:
Grout, Donald Jay. “The Age of the Renaissance: Ockeghem to Josquin” and “Josquin de Prez” from A History of Western Music, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Required listening:
Plainchant – Nigra sum
Jean Lheritier – Nigra sum
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina – Nigra sum
Tomas Luis de Victoria – Nigra sum
Session 8: Harmonic intervals (verticality) vs. counterpoint. Expression (freedom) vs. consistency (imitation). Discussion of the listenings: similarities (based on the same chant) and differences. Compare the change of style from l’Heritier to Gesualdo; the pattern of change present in all periods. Cadences, phrases, and form.
Required readings:
Toch, Ernst. “The bases of Form” from The Shaping Forces in Music, New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977.
Required listening:
Josquin – Pange lingua (imitative counterpoint – consistency) Josquin – Mille regrets (word painting – expression)
Session 9: Explanation of form charts.Review Middle Ages through Renaissance. Student presentations
Required readings:
McAdams, Stephen. “Psychological Constraints on Form Bearing Dimensions in Music”, Contemporary
Music Review (1989). Online source: http://mediatheque.ircam.fr/articles/textes/McAdams89a/ [2]
Session 10: More on form and what creates form. Why do we have a form? Do other arts have form? Why?
Student presentations
Required readings:
Grout, Donald Jay. “Early Baroque Opera” and “Josquin de Prez” from A History of Western Music, New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Required listening:
Students will make a visual form chart or map of J.S. Bach’s Invention no.1.
Session 11: What made it easy to determine the form? Cadences. Introduction to tonality as a system of weights. Expression vs. control revisited.
Student presentations
Required readings:
Thoresen, Lasse. “Form-building Transformations: An Approach to the Aural Analysis of Emergent Musical Forms”, JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning 4, Winter 2007 [http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=4.3] [3], sec.3.1.1.
Required listening:
Bach – Well Tempered Clavier Prelude no. 1
Bach – cello suite no.2 prelude
Session 12: What does well tempered mean? Introduction to the harmonic series and temperament. Discussion of Bach’s audacity when composing The Art of the Fugue.
Student presentations
Required readings:
De Santillana, Giorgio. “Philosophical Intermezzo”, The Crime of Galileo, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1967.
Required listening:
Bach – Invention no 2
Haydn – piano sonata in C major op. 60
Session 13: Discuss the listenings and extract similarities and differences (if any). Discuss balance, contour, rhythm, imitation, etc. What does this balance tell us about the time? “The world is a clock”. Student presentations
Required readings:
Barenboim, Daniel and Said, Eduard W., Parallels and Paradoxes, pg.38-49, Edited by Ara Guzeliman, New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002.
Required listening:
Mozart – Nocturnes for Clarinet
Haydn – piano sonata in C major op. 60
Session 14: Discussion of tonality as a dramatic device – sonata form. Tonality as a structural tool. Student presentations
Required readings:
Schumann, Robert. “Berlioz’s Sinfonie Fantastique”, “A monument to Beethoven” from Schumann on
Music, ed. Henry Pleasants, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1988.
Required listening:
Beethoven – Eroica symphony
Beethoven – String quartet op. 95
Session 15: Classical vs. Romantic – expression of emotion vs. imposition of emotion. Discussion of the Romantic myth and its effects on music (the conductor, the virtuoso, the composition as a world in linear evolution, etc), relate this to the Beethoven listening (growth, construction, etc.)
Student presentations
Required readings:
Kruse, Felicia E. “Emotion in Musical Meaning: a Pierciean Solution to Langer’s Dualsm” from
Transactions of Charles S. Pierce Society vol. 41 no. 4 (2005). Required listening:
Berlioz – Fantastic Symphony
Wagner – Excerpts from the Ring Cycle
Session 16: Discussion of the listenings and readings: music as an expression of aesthetic thinking and philosophy. The division between Dionisiacs and Apollinians in all forms of art. Nationalism (Bartok, etc.) Spanish Nationalism (Pedrell and de Falla).
Required readings:
Hanslick, Eduard. “The Representation of Feeling is not the Content of Music” from On The Musically
Beautiful, ed. Geoffrey, Payzant, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986.
Required listening:
Schoenberg – Variations for Orchestra
Berg Lyric Suite excerpt
Webern - Pasacaglia
Session 17: The 20th century. Explosion and crisis in music... and the world. Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern). Discussion of the listening to point out that music hasn’t changed that much; only the material has been transformed. Point out the emphasis on the motive and construction of the piece. Brief discussion of the neo-classicists (Stravinsky).
Required readings:
Schoenberg, Arnold. “Schoenberg’s Tone Rows”, “Composition With Twelve Tones” from Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
Required listening:
Felipe Pedrell – Los Pirineos
Albéniz - Iberia
Manuel de Falla – El Amor Brujo
Boulez Marteau sans maitre
Session 18: Consequences of 12-tone thinking. When the system becomes the piece; notes as atoms, phrases as molecules and pieces like minerals. What does this tell us about the world?
Discussion of the readings. In-class listenings of Soler.
Required readings:
Babbitt, Milton. “Who Cares if You Listen?” High Fidelity Magazine, February 1958. Schumacher, E. F. “Levels of Being” from A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Vintage, 1995.
Required listening:
Debussy Nouages
Session 19: The 20th century: another version. Debussy, Ravel, Varese, Grisey and Hurel. De Falla’s interpretation of “nationalism” and his Debussian influence.
Required readings:
Kane, Brian. “L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Reflections on the Philosophical Origins of Musique Concret”,
Spark (magazine), February 18, 2005.
Russolo, Luigi. “Futurist Manifesto: the Art of Noises” (1931), Music Since 1900, ed. Nicolas Slonimsky, trans. Stephen Sommervell, 1971.
Required listening:
Schaeffer Etude aux chemins de fer
Session 20: Electronic music. Schaeffer, Ussachevsky, Subotnik, Stockhausen, etc. Explain project guidelines.
Required readings:
Ferrara, Lawrence. “An Eclectic Method for Sound, Form and Reference” from Philosophy and the
Analysis of Music, USA: Excelsior Music Pub. Co., 1991.
Required listening:
Varese Poeme Electronique or Ussachevsky’s Incantation
Work on the project.
Session 21: Project Q&A. Example analysis (following the guidelines) of Edgard Varese’s Poeme
Electronique or Ussachevsky’s Incantation.
Required readings:
Carter, Elliott. “The Composer’s Viewpoint” and “The Fallacy of the Mechanistic Approach” from
Collected Essays and Lectures 1937-1995, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1998.
Session 22: Project Q&A. Finish analysis. La cançó: protest song in Catalunya. Rock Català: the
American influence.
Required readings:
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations, London: Pimlico, 1999.
Session 23: Project Q&A. Jazz as the real melting pot: East meets West, flamenco-Jazz, Fusion, Mediterranean, etc. The Barcelona Sound.
Work on project
Session 24: Project Q&A. Film scoring. Experimentalism and minimalism. Why doesn’t Spain have any? Work on project
Final exam
Babbitt, Milton. “Who Cares if You Listen?”, High Fidelity Magazine, February 1958.
Barenboim, Daniel and Said, Eduard W., Parallels and Paradoxes, pg.28-38, Eited by Ara Guzeliman, New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002.
Barenboim, Daniel and Said, Eduard W., Parallels and Paradoxes, pg.38-49, Edited by Ara Guzeliman,
New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations, pg. 211-244, London: Pimlico, 1999.
Carter, Elliott. “The Composer’s Viewpoint” (pg. 3-5) and “The Fallacy of the Mechanistic Approach” (pg. 15-16) from Collected Essays and Lectures 1937-1995, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1998.
De Santillana, Giorgio. “Philosophical Intermezzo”, pg. 56-73, The Crime of Galileo, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Ferrara, Lawrence. “An Eclectic Method for Sound, Form and Reference” from Philosophy and the
Analysis of Music, pg. 179-187, USA: Excelsior Music Pub. Co., 1991.
Grout, Donald Jay. “Apendix: A typical mass”, A History of Western Music, pg. 75-78, New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Grout, Donald Jay. “Notre Dame Organum”, “Polyphonic Conductus”, “The Motet”, A History of Western
Music, pg. 88-113, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Grout, Donald Jay. “Ars Nova in France”, “Italian Trecento”, “French Music of the Late Fourteenth Century”, “Chromaticism and Musica Ficta” from A History of Western Music, pg. 118-140, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Grout, Donald Jay. “The Age of the Renaissance: Ockeghem to Josquin” and “Josquin de Prez” from A
History of Western Music, pg. 169-203, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Grout, Donald Jay. “Early Baroque Opera” and from A History of Western Music, pg. 303-314, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1980.
Hanslick, Eduard. “The Representation of Feeling is not the Content of Music” from On The Musically
Beautiful, pg. 8-27, ed. Geoffrey, Payzant, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986.
Kane, Brian. “L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Reflections on the Philosophical Origins of Musique Concret”, Spark (magazine), February 18, 2005.
Kruse, Felicia E. “Emotion in Musical Meaning: a Pierciean Solution to Langer’s Dualsm” from
Transactions of Charles S. Pierce Society vol. 41 no. 4 (2005), pg. 762-778.
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. “Concepts we Live By”, The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts”, “Metaphorical Systematicity: Highlighting and Hiding”, Metaphors We Live By, pg. 3-13, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
McAdams, Stephen. “Psychological Constraints on Form Bearing Dimensions in Music”, pg. 1-13,
Contemporary Music Review (1989). Online source:
http://mediatheque.ircam.fr/articles/textes/McAdams89a/ [2]
Plato. “Republic”, The Collected Dialogues, pg.623-630, 643-648, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Russolo, Luigi. “Futurist Manifesto: the Art of Noises” (1931), Music Since 1900, ed. Nicolas Slonimsky, trans. Stephen Sommervell, 1971.
Schoenberg, Arnold. “Schoenberg’s Tone Rows”, “Composition With Twelve Tones” from Style and Idea, pg. 213-218, ed. Leonard Stein, Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
Schumacher, E. F. “Levels of Being” from A Guide for the Perplexed, pg. 25-35, London: Vintage, 1995.
Schumann, Robert. “Berlioz’s Sinfonie Fantastique” (pg. 78-88), “A monument to Beethoven” (pg. 91-
97), from Schumann on Music, ed. Henry Pleasants, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1988. Stravinsky, Igor. “The Phenomenon of Music”, Poetics of Music, pg. 23-43, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1998.
Thoresen, Lasse. “Form-building Transformations: An Approach to the Aural Analysis of Emergent
Musical Forms”, JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning 4, Winter 2007 [ http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=4.3 [4]], sec.3.1.1. Online source contains Quiktime movies as examples but no page numbers.
Toch, Ernst. “The bases of Form” from The Shaping Forces in Music, pg. 154-160, New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977.
Calvino, Italo, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, London, Vintage, 1996.
Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language and Thought, New York, NY, Harper & Row, 1971.
Langer, Susanne K., Philosophy in a New Key, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1979. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001.
Schoenberg, Arnold, Style and Idea, Berkley, CA, University of California Press, 1984.
Schumacher, E.F., A Guide for the Perplexed, London, Vintage, 1995.
Stravinsky, Igor, Poetics of Music, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998.