A sampler of courses I’ve designed and taught at Duquesne University.
Chamber Music of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms
The piano music, songs and small-ensemble music of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms are suffused with a poetic, literary element that transcends genre. In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the intimate expressive world of the Hausmusik of these three closely-related composers, drawing connections across the boundary between vocal and instrumental music. Fusing scholarship with active music-making whenever possible, we will focus on selected repertoire through musicological study, analysis, discussion, and performance. Along the way, we will tackle a variety of issues, including cultural and political context, historical and contemporary performance practice, and the relevance of the composers’ biographies.
Studying Music as Performance
We commonly acknowledge that music is one of the performing arts. Yet when we talk about music, we usually refer to it as a thing rather than an activity, as something that is rather than something one does. In this course, we will discover what we can learn about music (and ourselves as musicians) when we put performance at the center of our musicological inquiry. While our focus will be on the Western classical tradition, we will also have ample opportunity to consider popular music, non-Western music, and other musical performance situations that take place outside of the concert hall and opera house.
Musicology, Performance, Outreach
In this course, students of performance will use musicology to develop ways of reaching out to their audiences more successfully. We will learn how to write program notes, prepare pre-concert lectures, and design unconventional performance events, all based on sound musicological research and with the goal of making the performance experience as engaging and enlightening as possible for an audience. Students will work on these projects over the course of the semester, with many opportunities for in-class feedback, review, and revision. We will study other examples of outreach materials and activities in order to assess their efficacy and inspire our own creativity. If circumstances permit, we will also put our work into practice by staging performance and outreach events for the Duquesne community and beyond.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
There is perhaps no work of greater consequence in the history of Western music than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It is ubiquitous and unavoidable, like a mountain casting a shadow over the last two hundred years. “We live in the valley of the Ninth – that we cannot help,” the musicologist Joseph Kerman once wrote. And yet Beethoven’s Ninth continues to raise difficult and important questions that do not admit of easy answers. For example, is it still possible to believe in the symphony’s vision of universal brotherhood? In this course, we will explore the Ninth from every possible angle and come to our own conclusions about its meaning, impact, and significance, both in historical contexts and for the present day. We will delve deeply into the score, guided in our critical listening by a wide range of musicological and theoretical writings. We will examine the symphony through the lenses of politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and social history. Finally, we will consider the long and complex artistic reception of Beethoven’s Ninth, not only in the realms of musical composition and performance, but also those of poetry, literature, film, ballet, popular culture, and more.
Romanticism in European Music and Culture
The Romantics of the 19th century put the individual and their own subjective perspective at the center of the universe. As a consequence, music was now considered the greatest of all the arts, precisely for its ability to engage our emotions and imaginations without recourse to overly concrete concepts or representations of reality. Poetry, literature, the visual arts, criticism and even philosophy aspired to be like music in order to achieve their own Romantic aims. In this course, we will compare musical expressions of Romanticism with its other cultural manifestations, not only to better understand Romantic music, but also to discover how the legacy of Romanticism continues to impact cultural life today.
J.S. Bach
A wide-ranging exploration of the life and works of Johann Sebastian Bach, addressing questions like these: Is Bach’s music truly universal? How can we reconcile the intellectual and expressive sides of Bach’s musical personality? What is the religious context for Bach’s music, and why does it matter? How does Bach’s music relate to that of his contemporaries, and what makes Bach special? Issues of performance and interpretation, including some unconventional modern responses to Bach, will be considered throughout.