BA Film Studies and Music

This course explores three different musical cultures/repertories and their contexts, focusing on such overall themes as ‘Making History: Progress and Tradition’; or ‘Musical Identities and Awakenings’. Each block of lectures examines a discrete aspect of music history within specific historical,  geographical, social and cultural boundaries. The precise content of the three blocks changes from year to year, but previous topics have included ‘The New German School (Liszt and Wagner)’,‘Nordic Music and National Awakenings’, and ‘Bob Dylan, the American Folk Revival and Protest Song’. 

Available as free choice, but note prerequisite of A Level Music or Grade VIII Theory or equivalent.

• To promote active and critical engagement with different musics and cultures
• To introduce a range of skills relating to researching, thinking and writing about music and its artistic, cultural and social contexts
• To provide a foundation for further study in the fields of musicology and/or ethnomusicology

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

• Engage intellectually with a wide range of music and its stylistic, aesthetic, cultural, social and political contexts
• Demonstrate an understanding of a range of different ways of approaching musicological study, and of the inherent problems in constructing a historical narrative
• Define and apply the appropriate skills required for University-level study, including research gathering, note-taking, critical reading and writing

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

•    Research and write about a range of music and cultures and relevant critical issues
•    Analyse and evaluate historical methods as used in musicological discourse
•    Reflect critically on music’s interaction with aesthetic, cultural and political context
 

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

• Show that they can access scholarly writings and resources in a range of media, including electronic resources
• Draw together ideas from a range of sources, with developing skills in the organization, interpretation and synthesis of information
• Develop and sustain a coherent argument in both written and verbal forms

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

• Show a burgeoning ability to produce good-quality work independently with developing critical self-awareness
• Demonstrate a growing ability to communicate ideas and information clearly in written and verbal form
• Demonstrate increasing levels of intellectual curiosity and the potential to approach tasks in a systematic and creative way
   

Each block of the course unit has its own reading and listening lists.  The following titles provide general support for all three blocks:

• Beard, David and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2016).  
• Clayton, Martin, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
• Garratt, James, Music and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Spitzer, Michael, The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).  
• Taruskin, Richard, The Oxford History of Western Music, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).