A specialized course in musical criticism. The topic will change each time the course is offered.

This seminar examines song culture in the fifteenth century as a site where the boundaries between musical genres, media, and social hierarchies become unstable. We will study a wide range of repertory—from songs in the international high-art traditions to so-called “rustic” songs and works by elite composers writing in popular registers—not to establish a hierarchy of value, but to understand how songs circulated, were recomposed and recontextualized across musical forms, and appear cited or embedded in literary texts, theatrical works, and visual media. Methodological concerns will include: how to work simultaneously with musical, literary, visual, and material evidence; how to attend to textual transmission and reuse as evidence of cultural reception; and how to recognize our own categorical habits when we encounter sources that resist them. We will engage with both primary sources and recent scholarship that models critical approaches to song culture, genre, and register.

Repeat Rules