Past Course Offerings

Last Offered: Fall 2021 (University of Denver)

Where did musical notation first emerge, East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or Western Europe? What kind of music might you have encountered in Northern Africa towards the end of the Roman Empire? How aware were thirteenth-century Europeans of middle Eastern singing techniques, and what did they make of what they heard? This course will address the intriguing and often surprising answers to these questions. Students will engage with music scholarship beyond Western music history in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how music was performed and perceived by diverse groups and individuals in different parts of the world before ca. 1600. Topics will include religious difference, disability, gender, race, and class, as well as modern responses to and portrayals of the musics, musicians, patrons, and audiences we will encounter.

Last Offered: Winter 2022 (University of Denver)

What do Henry Purcell, Richard Wagner, and Kanye West have in common? Each created musical works informed by contemporary understandings of the Middle Ages. As we will discover in this course, the phenomenon known as medievalism—that is, the perception of the medieval past in post-medieval settings—is surprisingly common, not only among Western musicians but in broader cultural settings as well. This course will examine the nature of medievalism in a wide variety of musical genres and cultures. We will consider the ways in which musicians and listeners have employed their perceptions of the Middle Ages to signify such varied ideas and values as authenticity, romanticism, racial identity, nationalism, humor, virtue, masculinity, liberation, and magic. In addition, we will explore the effects of such fantasies about the past on composers, performers, and audiences and their interpretation of pre-modern music in the modern era. The music discussed in this course will run the gamut from plainchant to hip-hop and will include opera, film scores, choral and orchestral works, folk songs, and popular music. We will read and discuss scholarly works from within and without musicology, drawing on the rich and varied emergent field of medievalism as it pertains to literature, film, history, and politics. No prior knowledge of music or the Middle Ages is required to succeed in this course.

Last Offered: Spring 2021 (University of Denver)

This course investigates the ways in which gender and sexuality have influenced and been influenced by music, musicians, musical (sub)cultures, and music scholars in the Western world. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, students will explore the complex, shifting dynamic of gender and performance as applied to music of the past and present. Our objects of inquiry will include a wide variety of Western music written, performed, and consumed from the eleventh century to the present day, comprising an array of musical genres such as medieval love songs, chamber music, orchestral works, opera, folk music, doo-wop, hip-hop, and pop. Artists whose work will serve as case studies include Hildegard von Bingen, Barbara Strozzi, Clara Wieck Schumann, The Shirelles, Klaus Nomi, MC Lyte, Kesha, Big Freedia, and Lizzo.

**Critical Approaches to Opera History, Staging, and Production**

Last Offered: Winter 2021 (University of Denver)

This course addresses cultural, historical, analytical, aesthetic, and scholarly issues relevant to the history of opera. This semester our theme will be adaptation. We will consider the various ways in which composers, librettists, singers, patrons, conductors, listeners, and scholars have adapted to changes in social and cultural practices surrounding and subsuming opera, as well as to changes in the art form itself. Each week is organized around a different sub-theme related to the larger theme of adaptation. The operas covered include representative works by Monteverdi, Gluck, Donizetti, Offenbach, Verdi, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Strauss, Britten, Adams, and Saariaho.

Last Offered: Fall 2020 (University of Denver)