160006 VO Music History IV (The Twentieth Century and Beyond) (2024S)

The aim of the course is to offer a broad understanding of the relationship between western music and its changing social, cultural, historical, and geographical contexts during the long twentieth century (1890-present).

Traditional introductions to C20 music tend to focus on art music and they tend to be work based, where the work is seen as a stable entity free of social or historical context. We will follow this approach to some extent in a series of required readings. The readings will cover the ‘great’ composers and their ‘works’; however, they will also place these in their cultural, institutional, historical, geographical contexts.

The lectures take a more up-to-date approach, based on the recent book Twentieth-Century Music in the West (2022). We take a non-hierarchical approach to popular music, art music, film music, and jazz considering them in their various entangled contexts. Instead of thinking about individual composers and works, in individual countries, from year to year, we will instead consider various music and cultural practices, and consider how they developed across time and place often over the course of many decades. We will also examine the variety of music-critical approaches one might use to understand these various themes. We will use individual pieces, practices, and musicians as case studies in this exploration.

While you will emerge from the course with knowledge of the ‘great works’ (albeit in popular music, film music, and jazz, as well as art music), you will also understand how the various music practices of the twentieth century developed in step with their social, cultural and historical contexts.