MusB Music

This course equips students with the critical tools and theories necessary for understanding music’s political dimensions and cultural significance. It applies these to a series of related historical case studies from the French Revolution to the First World War, focusing on figures, texts and works that have had a defining impact on perceptions of Western music and its politics. The course probes the issues involved in interpreting music’s shifting political functions and meanings, exploring musical institutions and discourses as well as key genres and works from Beethoven to Wagner and beyond.

• To foster a deeper understanding of the cultural and political contexts, meanings and functions of music
• To introduce a range of relevant theoretical approaches and issues in the study of culture and of music and politics
• To discuss and evaluate a wide range of current scholarly approaches to the study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music history
• To explore the cultural and political significance of a range of key musical works, institutions, discourses and cultures

• Demonstrate a broad understanding of the cultures and discourses they have studied and music’s place within them
• Demonstrate a grasp of music’s political functions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of the theoretical issues and challenges they pose
• Demonstrate familiarity with a broad range of scholarly approaches, and an understanding of current issues and debates 

• Demonstrate the ability to interpret, discuss and compare the socio-political dimensions of a range of texts and musical works
• Interpret, compare and make connections between primary texts; engage critically with secondary literature; and formulate their own perspectives
• Summarize, evaluate and critique arguments

• Articulate, discuss and support findings coherently in both written and verbal form
• Work effectively both independently and in groups towards clearly delineated goals
• Synthesize ideas and standpoints from diverse sources into coherent arguments

• Pose questions about complex issues, and deal sensitively with controversial and potentially offensive matters
• Demonstrate enhanced interpersonal skills
• Demonstrate enhanced presentational skills

• Written feedback on assignment, with additional oral feedback available in dedicated consultation hours
• Oral feedback on seminar contributions and presentations

Agnew, Vanessa, ‘The Colonialist Beginnings of Comparative Musicology’, in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln, NE, 2005), 41–60.

Applegate, Celia, and Pamela Potter (eds), Music and German National Identity (Chicago and London, 2002).

Applegate, Celia, The Necessity of Music: Variations of a German Theme (Toronto, 2017).

Buch, Esteban, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago and London, 2003).

Chua, Daniel, Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017).

Eckhard, John, and David Robb, Songs for a Revolution: The German Protest Tradition of 1848 (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, 2020.

Eichner, Barbara, History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848–1914 (Woodbridge, 2012).

Garratt, James, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (Cambridge, 2010).

Garratt, James, Music and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, 2019).

Gramit, David, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests and Limits of German Musical Culture 1770–1848 (Berkeley, 2002).

Hoeckner, Berthold, ‘Wagner and the Origin of Evil’, The Opera Quarterly 23 (2007), 151–83.

Johnson-Williams, Erin, ‘Valuing Whiteness: The Presumed Innocence of Musical Truth’, Current Musicology 109–110 (2022), 43–73.

Mathew, Nicholas, Political Beethoven (Cambridge, 2013).

Morat, Daniel, ‘Cheers, Songs, and Marching Sounds: Acoustic Mobilization and Collective Affects at the Beginning of World War I’, in Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe, ed. Morat (New York, 2014), 178–200.

Rinehart, Nicholas T., ‘Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History’, Transition (2013), 117–130.

Weiner, Marc A., Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, NE, 1995).