Music and Shakespeare (343-0-1)
Instructors
Linda P Austern
847/491-5705
l-austern@northwestern.edu
Office Hours: E-mail instructor to arrange a meeting.
Specialist in Renaissance and baroque musical-cultural relations, gender and feminist theory, European iconography, music as related to visual art and the early history of science. Recipient of major fellowships and research grants, including American Council of Learned Societies, British Academy, Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute (Radcliffe College/Harvard University), and National Endowment for the Humanities. Author, Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance (Gordon and Breach, 1992), Music in English Life and Thought 1550-1650 (forthcoming); editor, Music, Sensation and Sensuality (Routledge, 2002), editor, Music and the Sirens (Indiana University Press, 2006). Author of numerous articles and reviews in books and such journals as Journal of the American Musicological Society, Modern Philology, Music and Letters, and Renaissance Quarterly.
Meeting Info
RCMA Lower Level 121: Mon, Wed 11:00AM - 12:20PM
Overview of class
This course offers students the opportunity to explore some of the many intersections between Shakespearean drama and music from the late sixteenth century through the early twenty-first, not only in many sorts of performance of the plays themselves, but also in opera, ballet, film, musical theatre, art-song, popular music, and the symphony, to name only a few. Textual languages include not only The Bard's original English and its more modern forms, but also French, German, Hindi, Italian and Russian for starters; our media also go well beyond the stage and written page known to Shakespeare and his early audiences. Given the character and complexity of the material, and the multimedia and interdisciplinary natures of Shakespeare-inspired musical works and scholarship, this course is open to students whose primary interest or field of study is comparative literature, film, English, performance studies, or theatre, as well as any area of music.