| Unit name | Inside Medieval Music |
|---|---|
| Unit code | MUSI30122 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Professor. Hornby |
| Open unit status | Open |
| Pre-requisites |
None (but students wishing to take this module as an open unit music have sufficient technical expertise in reading musical notation and discussing music from a technical perspective) |
| Co-requisites |
none |
| School/department | Department of Music |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Medieval music is often approached as a survey, with the development of musical style driving the discussion. In this unit, we take a totally different approach. We take a case study every week of a piece of medieval music, or a small group of pieces, and get right inside it. We will examine these pieces in their historical, cultural and social context. We will explore different ways of analysing them, in order to find ways of understanding their practical and aesthetic value, in their own time and today. We will explore what this kind of music might have meant to the people who created, performed and heard it. Students will build up an expert sense of different ways in which medieval music can be approached productively by scholars, and will be able to participate in scholarly debates about different conceptual and methodological approaches to the repertoire.
This unit aims:
At the end of the unit, students will be able to demonstrate:
1. detailed knowledge and understanding of specific musical pieces from the middle ages studied in class, from a variety of methodological perspectives (analytical, style-historical, notational, cultural)
2. detailed knowledge and understanding of a related musical repertoire, studied independently, with a focus on one or more of its musical language, notation/performance, or cultural context
3. detailed knowledge and understanding of scholarly debates that surround the studied musical repertoire
4. the ability to incorporate a consistently strong grasp of detail with respect to content
5. the ability to argue effectively and at length (including an ability to cope with complexities and to describe and deploy these effectively) in a written format
11x2 hour classes for the whole cohort
1x3000-word essay (50%)
Individual workfile (50%). This consists of blog entries of up to 1000 words for any five weeks of the course, summarising the key points of the material encountered in pre-class reading and responding to it critically. Students will post their entries on a course blog. Students submit 5 weekly posts in order to pass this unit. The best three marks will count towards the unit mark
Both assessments will demonstrate the learning outcome (1). The workfile will in particular provide an opportunity for the students to demonstrate (1) and (3); the essay will in particular provide an opportunity for the students to demonstrate (2), in light of (3), as well as (4) and (5).
Mark Everist, Music Before 1600, Models of Musical Analysis 2. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992
Margaret Bent, ‘The Grammar of Early Music’ in Tonal structures in early music Ed. Cristle Collins Judd (2000)
Suzannah Clark, ‘S’en dirai chanconete’: hearing text and music in a medieval motet’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 16 (2007), 31-60
Dolores Pesce (ed), Hearing the Motet: essays on the motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (OUP, 1998)
Margot Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (Yale, 2010)
