Music 690C - Topics in Musical Culture

This course will provide graduate students in all Music Department areas the opportunity to deeply explore a bounded musical topic by examining it through a historical or historiographical lens. Regardless of the topic selected for a given iteration of this class, the class will always be defined by its focus on historiography, in other words the question of how a particular topic has been established, explained, theorized, and debated by people over time. Thus, one focus of the course regardless of its specific topic will be introducing students to the methods and practices of musicological research.

Undergraduate Music majors may enroll with Instructor permission only.
Request SPIRE enrollment by submitting a Music Dept Course Override Form.

Fall 2024 Topic: Sounding American in the 19th Century
When, where, and how did American music become "American"? All too often, answers to this question turn to early twentieth-century debates and examples, but the construction of an American musical identity began long before then. Sacred choral music in America changed forever with the publication of The Sacred Harp (1844), Southern Harmony (1835), African American spirituals and Gospel hymns, and hymnody by Lowell Mason. A burgeoning sheet music industry propelled parlor song into antebellum American homes, while songwriters later composed music for and against social reform, labor movements, immigration, and war. Music collectors and composers seeking an authentic American sound appropriated Native American music, as well as folk songs, ballads, and spirituals. Racist and exploitative minstrel shows became the most popular musical art form in mid-century America. The establishment of conservatories and schools of music like Oberlin, The Boston Conservatory, The National Conservatory, and the New England Conservatory coincided with American colleges and universities anxiously adding music to their curricula. Following European models, opera and musical theatre companies in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago were bustling with performances of Italian and French operas translated into English, while orchestras, choruses, and music societies like the Handel & Haydn Society, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the New York Philharmonic, the Deutscher Liederkranz, and the Boston Symphony took root. Musical tastes were announced through publications like the Boston-based Dwight's Journal of Music, as composers of the Second New England School sought to create a distinct American sound that was still rooted in a mostly Germanic tradition. This course explores the lives and musical works of nineteenth-century Americans, tracing the origins and development of a variety of genres and traditions and the contributions of composers, performers, teachers, and writers seeking a music for and of America. This course will engage with the digital collections of the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, New York Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony. It will also include one required field trip to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA.