MUSC 40503 - Music History III

This course offers a broad introduction to the history of music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to developing skills pertinent to matters of style, genre, function, and form, students will engage with the social, cultural, and philosophical contexts of musicking from a global perspective. Historical trends in vernacular musics and the sheet music and recording industries; connections between race, gender, genre, and the music industry; the cross-pollination of musical traditions and the influence of the recording industry across genre; the retreat of composers of “Art Music” to the academy; the use of music in film and emerging technologies; music and globalization; and post-tonal compositional techniques will be emphasized in this course. Above all, this course aims to foster and develop listening skills essential to thinking, speaking, and writing critically and intelligently about all musical traditions, and to combine these skills with historical and cultural knowledge of diverse musical traditions.

Preparation for Course
P. MUSC 10500.

Cr. 3.
Student Learning Outcomes
1. Increase musical vocabulary, define pertinent concepts/movements, and develop sophisticated language used to speak and write effectively about musicking from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
2. Develop critical listening skills to engage with and speak about music on a deeper, more intellectual, level.
3. Become familiar with the cultural contexts from which music arose and how music signifies in diverse soundscapes.
4. Demonstrate an awareness of why musical sources were created, what kinds of evidence historians use to construct music historiography, and what historical sources can tell us about musicking of past eras.
5. Understand the ways in which understanding music history can impact our lives today and identify the multifarious agendas of historians.
6. Determine the genre, function, significance, and appropriate soundscapes of an unknown piece of music by identifying its stylistic features through listening and score study.
7. Compose essays about music of this period using appropriate terminology and learn how to structure and edit writing to a level of professionalism appropriate for university undergraduate students.