Music Analysis and Criticism

Recommended Prerequisites

NA

Teaching Methods

The work in the course takes the form of a exposition-debate, seeking to encourage critical debate and collaborative work in the classroom (teacher-student and student-student) informed by intense musical experiences (musical listening moments, emphasizing its constitution as humanly sound patterns organized) and their negotiation with aesthetic, historical, theoretical, and literary readings.

Learning Outcomes

To develop and apply an analytic-aesthetic lexicon appropriate to the musical experience of the listener.

To develop a critical perspective that articulates the relationships between phenomenological, affective and historical approaches, and recognizes the diversity of aesthetic currents and the space that music occupies in the contemporary world.

To understand and practice discourses that navigate between Music Theory, Analysis, Criticism and Aesthetics.

The student should be able to:

- Apply discursive approaches that articulate subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity in musical thought;

- Analyze an event, recording, or musical current by balancing general theoretical-aesthetic principles and analytical remarks for specific musical works or practices;

- Locate aesthetic concepts and values in the historical-cultural context to which they belong, as well as crossing them with other philosophical, artistic and cultural problems.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

1. Hearing, listening and the communion with sound: objectivity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity.

2. Feeling and understanding music: relationships between Phenomenology, History and meaning.

3. Domains and limits of Theory, Analysis, Criticism, Musical Aesthetics and their interactions.

4. Modes of musical experience and the relationship between time and imagination: process and work, autonomy and function of music.

5. Ontology and limits of musical aesthetics and the relationship with other arts and domains of time and space.

6. Musical thought in Classical Antiquity and Medieval times: music as imitation and as number.

7. Rationality and Enlightenment: music as affection and its relationship with drama.

8. Romantic Idealism and Modern Crisis: language and formalism, semiology and musical analysis.

9. Criticism and aesthetics in the multiplicity and diversity of (musical) cultures.

Head Lecturer(s)

José António Oliveira Martins

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Mini Tests: 10.0%
Participation: 20.0%
Synthesis work: 30.0%
Research work: 40.0%

Bibliography

Adorno, T. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Routledge.

Barenboim, D. 2008. Everything is Connected. London: Orion.

Berger, K. 2000. A Theory of Art, Oxford UP.

Bonds, M. E. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. Oxford UP.

Born, G (ed.) 2000. Western Music and its Others. UCPress.

Dahlhaus, C. 1983. Analysis and Value Judgment. NY: Pendragon Press.

Fernandes, C. e Rancel, M. 2021. A imprensa como fonte para a história da interpretação musical. B. Nacional.

Fubini, E. 2008 (1993). Estética da Música. Lisboa: Edições 70.

Gracyk, T. 2007. Listening to Popular Music. U Michigan Press.

Grimshaw-Aagaard, M.(ed.) 2019.  O. H. Sound and Imagination. OUP.

Lourenço, E. 2012. Tempo da Música, Música do Tempo. Lisboa: Gradiva.

McAuley, T. 2021. Western Music and Philosophy. OUP.

Tavares, G. M.2015. Breves Notas Sobre Música. Lisboa: Relógio d’́Agua.

Wright, C. 2012. The Essential Listening to Music. NY:Schirmer.