Sound arts in modernity

Recommended Prerequisites

NA

Teaching Methods

Classes are expository, combined with (individual and group) presentations by students; reading texts and critical listening to music.

Learning Outcomes

1. To master and to recognize the chronology, genealogy and plurality of modernist aesthetics of Western art music.

2. To conceptualize modernity as a historical period, process and narrative of the West.

3. To understand how the emergence of sound mediation technologies had a decisive impact not only on the production and consumption of music, but also on other arts, in particular cinema and theater.

4. To understand artistic production in the context of modernity vis-à-vis the development of cultural industries, mass culture and modern capitalism.

5. To identify the emergence of popular culture (and popular music) in the technological, cultural and historical context of modernity and its impact on artistic production.

6. To be aware of the main debates carried out by the Frankfurt School around art and modernity (in particular by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno).

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

Modernity corresponds both to a historical period and to the narrative that resulted from its accentuated political, technological, philosophical, cultural and social transformations. This syllabus focuses in particular on the ways in which music and sound arts were shaped by this process and how they themselves produced a modern worldview and aurality. Encompassing a musical genealogy of the modern period, the syllabus will also approach the main aesthetic currents of Western art music from the middle of the 19th century and its philosophical foundation, understood in counterpoint with social and technological transformations, and by the defining moments of contemporary history. On the other hand, given the development of a consumer society, it discusses how the sound arts constituted a terrain of cultural production around which the notion of popular music and mass culture that we know today was developed, and supported the development of the music and film industries.

Head Lecturer(s)

Nádia Margarida Trindade Moura

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Reading and participation: 20.0%
Exam: 40.0%
Synthesis work: 40.0%

Bibliography

Theodor Adorno e J. M. Bernstein. 2001. The culture industry: Selected essays in mass-culture. Routledge: London and New York.

Benjamin, Walter. 2006. A Modernidade. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim.

Born, Georgina e David Hesmondhalgh (eds.). 2000. Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in music. Berkeley: University of   California Press.

Hall, Stuart. 2019. Essential Essays vol.1. Durham: Duke University Press.

Middleton, Richard. 2001. “Popular Music.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: MacMillan Press.

Morgan, Robert P. 1991. Twentieth-Century Music. London and New York: Norton.

Taylor, Timothy. 2016. Music and Capitalism: A history of the Present. Chicago: Universrtiy of Chicago Press.

Venn, Couze. 2000. Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity. London: Sage.