Topics in Medieval Music (350-0-1)
Topic
Medieval Music
Instructors
Drew Edward Davies
847/467-3367
dedavies@northwestern.edu
Specialist in 16th- through 18th-century musics of Latin America and Iberia in global contexts, and 20th-century Britain. Articles and reviews published in Eighteenth-Century Music, Sanctorum, Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, Journal of the Society for American Music,Heterofonía, BoletínMúsica (Havana) and The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Dissertation <cite>The Italianized Frontier: Music at Durango Cathedral, Español Culture, and the Aesthetics of Devotion in Eighteenth-Century New Spain</cite> received the 2006 Wiley Housewright Award from the Society for American Music. Mexico City Regional Coordinator for Musicat, the Seminario Nacional de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente (National Seminar on the Music of New Spain and Independent Mexico) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Monograph Music and Devotion in New Spain under contract with Oxford University Press.
Meeting Info
RCMA Lower Level 115: Mon, Wed 11:00AM - 12:20PM
Overview of class
This course will engage repertoires of Mediterranean and European music practiced and conceived between the 6th and early 15th centuries. Focusing primarily on repertoires of plainchant, song, organum, and motet, this class will be organized as a pro-seminar in which lectures are balanced by student discussion on music, culture, and important scholarship. Students will acquire a basic understanding of medieval music notation, learn to navigate music manuscripts, learn about cultures in the Middle Ages, comment on issues of performance practice, and consider how concepts in musical aesthetics can also be located in the other arts and in society. I would like to inspire students to discover the beauty, richness, and intellectual appeal of medieval music, a music repertoire unfamiliar to most, yet tremendously rewarding and foundational to later practices. I would also like students to gain a wider historical framework in which to place common practice era music, contemporary music, and folk music, and question what is meant by Western music altogether, using music of the Middle Ages and its revival as a lens.
Registration Requirements
Students from outside the music department are welcome in the course and encouraged to meet with the instructor in the first weeks of the quarter to review music rudiments, if necessary.
Learning Objectives
• Become familiar with the principal genres of medieval music, specifically plainchant, song, organum, and motet;
• Learn to navigate and understand the basic content of medieval music manuscripts;
• Explore different of interdisciplinary scholarship in medieval music and culture;
• Review Mediterranean and European history in the period 500-1500 and be able to differentiate attributes of each century;
• Build critical perspectives toward performance traditions of medieval repertories since the 1950s
Class Materials (Required)
Margot Fassler, Music in the Medieval West (Norton, 2014). Either the hard copy of the book, which is available through online retailers, or the e-book version, is acceptable. [$20-$45]
Class Attributes
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area