MUMH 6770 "Concert Music and Ritual in the Twentieth Century: Stravinsky, Birtwistle, and Britten"
Margaret Notley
Fall 2005
Before the nineteenth century most Western music was composed for venues other than the concert or opera hall and often filled a ritualistic function. While little of the canonic music from the past two centuries was intended to serve the ritualistic purposes from before, much highly regarded twentieth-century music seems ritualistic in tone, formal design, content, or some other respect. Stravinsky, Britten, and Birtwistle have frequently been singled out in this regard, the two later composers often considered to have taken Stravinsky as a model.
This course will explore a prominent yet elusive aspect of twentieth-century music, its sources, and its various ramifications. One larger goal is to understand how various cultural forces come into play in a piece of music and its performance; another, as in all seminars, is to encourage students to think critically about how they carry out their own work.