Medieval and Renaissance Music

Undergraduate

A survey of Western musical practices from the earliest notations to c. 1600. Topics include Gregorian chant and the development of musical notation, the courtly love songs of troubadours and trouvères, polyphonic practices in 13th-century Paris, and the new genres which emerged in the later Middle Ages: motet, chanson, and mass. We follow these through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a focus on style and social context. We will also be attuned throughout to the productive tension between sacred and secular and to examples of transformative musical borrowing—two themes which make the music on this syllabus a particularly rich object of study. Along the way, we pay attention to the processes of transmission, transcription, and editorial intervention that allow medieval songs to appear on a 21st-century syllabus. Familiarity with modern music notation is required. HU TTh 9am-10:15am