MusB Music

This course explores the connections between music, literature, and the visual arts. How have these art forms informed or overlapped with one another in the past? What sorts of collaboration have taken place? How might musical, literary, art-historical, and film studies work across disciplinary boundaries?  

Interdisciplinary study raises challenges for students in terms of methodologies, and this course encourages students to tackle approaches and sources with which they might be unfamiliar. The first week constitutes an introduction to methodological approaches, while each subsequent week covers different aspects of musical-literary and/or musical-visual interaction from the sixteenth century to the present day.  

Introduce students to a broad range of themes and research approaches.

Introduce students to critical concepts relating to music and cultural studies.

Encourage students to explore beyond the disciplinary boundaries of music, borrowing methods and perspectives from across the humanities.  

Week one: Methodologies

Week two: Multimedia in Early Modern England: The Broadside Ballad

Week three: Shakespeare and Musical Reception

Week four: Early Opera and its Depictions

Week five: Of Poetry and Song: German Lieder

Week six: The Pianist’s Palette: Liszt, Debussy, and their Artistic and Literary Influences

Week seven: German Expressionism: From Der Blaue Reiter to Woyzeck (Wozzeck)  

Week eight: Les Six and Cultural Pastimes in 1920s Paris

Week nine: The Harlem Renaissance

Week ten: Double Lives: Musicians as Visual Artists from Mendelssohn to Cage

Week eleven: Multimedia Concerts and Immersive Performances in the Twenty-First Century 

The course will be taught through a weekly two-hour lecture, plus one-hour seminar. Students will receive a lecture on the week’s topic, work in small groups on a variety of reading and source-related tasks, and contribute to full-class discussions. Some weeks will involve student presentations. For each weekly seminar, students will be expected to undertake and respond to both secondary and primary reading.

In class, students will participate in group work that will focus on the week’s set readings. Students will be able to present their own ideas to their peers and respond to the views of others. They will also be able to reflect on their own approaches to primary source analysis and secondary interpretation. Class discussions will focus on the main themes of the week’s topic and the historiographical debates surrounding it.

Assessment is through two assignments. The first assignment constitutes a primary source analysis. Each student is to write a short essay (35%; 1,500 words) on a musical score/performance and an artwork/literary work which share a subject, or which explore a topic but from contrasting viewpoints. For example, a student might want to write on the shared aesthetic between ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ by W. H. Auden and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. The second assignment (65%; 2,500 words) will be a second essay, written in response to the student’s choice of prompt which will be provided at the beginning of term. The second essay must engage with at least one musical score/performance and one artwork/literary work; moreover, the student should not choose primary source material which they have already explored in their first assignment. 

Upon completion of this course, students will have gained an understanding of:

Musical, literary, and artistic movements, including German Expressionism and the Harlem Renaissance.

Encompasses a broad range of Western art music, from classical to jazz, and its interactions with art and literature of the period.

Relates to other units on the MusB programme, including Performance Studies (see Weeks 10–11, Syllabus, below) and other Historical options, broadening the purview of the programme. 

Upon completion of this course, students will have gained an understanding of:

Musical, literary, and artistic movements, including German Expressionism and the Harlem Renaissance.

Encompasses a broad range of Western art music, from classical to jazz, and its interactions with art and literature of the period.

Relates to other units on the MusB programme, including Performance Studies (see Weeks 10–11, Syllabus, below) and other Historical options, broadening the purview of the programme. 

Upon completion of this course, students will have gained an understanding of:

Essay writing.

Primary source analysis (musical, textual, and visual).

Locating information from a range of sources, including books, journals, online databases, films, visual media, and online collections.

Participating in constructive historical debates through seminar participation. 

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

Consolidate skills in time management, self-motivation, self-management, and decision-making.

Demonstrate an improvement in oral and written communication skills.

Develop team-working and collaborative skills through group presentations.

Demonstrate the ability to present ideas clearly and cogently through presentations and seminar discussion. 

Dayan, Peter, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Ashgate, 2011)

Durkin, Rachael, The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (Routledge, 2022)

Hallmark, Rufus, ed., German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2010)

Shephard, Tim, and Anne Leonard, eds, The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2014)  

da Sousa Correa, Delia, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)