MHL602: Topics in Music History: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Readings

Topic One: “Les goûts réunis”

Jean-Laurent Le Cerf de la Viéville, Traité du bon gout en musique (excerpt)

François Raguenet, Parallele des Italiens et des François (1702) (excerpt)

Topic Two: Sonata

Charles Rosen, “The Coherence of the Musical Language” from The Classical Style (New York, W.W. Norton,1997) 57-98.

Charles Rosen, “Evolution of sonata forms ” from The Classical Style (New York, W.W. Norton,1997) 133-163.

Leonard Ratner, “Rhetoric”, excerpts from Chapter II of Classic Music:Expression, Form, and Style (New York, Schirmer,1980) 31- 47; 81-82; 91-107.

Topic Three: Music and the Inner Life

Annette Richards, “Sentiment undone: solitude and the clavichord cult” from The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque, Chapter 5 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Mary Hunter, “ ‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer’: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics” JAMS, vol.58 no.2, 2005.

"The Mature Baroque: The Doctrine of the Affections" excerpts from Descartes's Passions of the Soul and Mattheson's Der volkommene Capellmeister in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, eds., Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York, Schirmer, 1984) pp.212-219.

Topic Four: Beethoven

Heiligenstadt Testament (1802) (trans. H.C. Robbins Landon).

Lewis Lockwood, "Prologue, Youth Maturity, Old Age: Three Letters" from Beethoven: the Music and the Life (NY, Norton, 2003).

Carl Dahlhaus, “Life and Work ” from Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to his Music; trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford, Clarndon Press, 1991).

Topic Five: Opera

Joseph Kerman, “Prologue” from Opera as Drama (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988).