18th-Century Music: Seminar
MUSIC 216R
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
Enlightenment Musical & Literary Networks. This course investigates the possibilities, limitations, and consequences of “musical thought in the global enlightenments” (Bohlman 2018) by tracing local, national, and transregional networks of music and letters in performance and print. The published writing of Charles Burney (1726–1814) will serve as our point of departure as we follow the ideas circulating through his personal and professional circles in England (children Fanny, James, Susan; friends and collaborators Twining, Thrale, and Johnson), informants and idols in Europe (Rousseau, Metastasio, CPE Bach), and British patrons across the Global South (Hastings, Beckford, Hamilton). In addition to an array of eighteenth-century musical and literary genres, readings will cover canonical critiques and defenses of Enlightenment, as well as more recent decolonial, queer, and posthuman interventions. Major themes include: taste and performance, folk and national music, virtuosity and sensibility, cosmopolitanism and coloniality, theoretical and historiographical trends.
Course Notes
Open to undergraduates with permission of instructor.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
