The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, The Buchmann-Mehta School of Music


Name of Course: Music, Death and the Passage of Time

Semester I, 2017-2018
MA course, 2 hour weekly course

The course will be held in English.

Name of Lecturer: Professor Michal Grover Friedlander

Email: groverm@post.tau.ac.il

Reception time
office hours by appointment

תיאור הקורס

 השיעור יעסוק באופנים הייחודיים  בהם מוזיקה מביאה לידי ביטוי את הרגעי והחולף,  את הסופי והנצחי: את מהלך הזמן עצמו. השיעור יתמקד בנושאים הבאים: זמן כבונה צורה, טכנולוגיות  שימור הזמן החולף, ייצוג סופיות ומוות במוסיקה (כולל תרבויות מוזיקליות נכחדות), פילוסופיה  על הסופיות והחולף במוזיקה.

Course Description

The course deals with music’s unique position in expressing the inevitable passage of time and the fear of death.  The course focuses on the following themes: temporality and structure, arrest of time in technology, representaions of death, philosophy of music on transience and mortality.

Grade Calculation and Course Requirements

Attendance, class participation,  (on time) hand-in assignmeclass - 50% of final grade

End of term class presentation (20 min) - 50% of final paper

Course Topics (subject to revision)

Transience and Mortality in Music

I Temporality

1.Abbate, Carolyn. “Cipher and Performance in Sternberg’s Dishonored.” In Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, edited by Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb, 357–92. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, 

Gheorghiu duet with the dead Callas 

CARLO CENCIARELLI, “The Limits of Operatic Deadness Bizet, ‘Habanera’ (Carmen), Carmen, Act I,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 28, 2, 221–226  2016

Abbate “Sound Object Lessons,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 69, Number 3, pp. 793–829, 2016

Lydia Goehr, “Improvising Impromptu, Or, What to Do with a Broken String,”  The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1 Edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut 2014

2.Kathi Meyer-Baer‏, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology 1970

P. Alperson, “The philosophy of music: Formalism and beyond,” in ‏Peter Kivy, ed. The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics 2004

Benedict Taylor, The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era (Oxford, 2016)

II Technology

3.Catherine Grant, MUSIC SUSTAINABILITY  In Oxford Bibliographies in Music. Ed. B. Gufstafson. New York: Oxford University Press

Max Paddison, “Performance, relflcatlon, and score: The dialectics of spatialization and temporality in the experience of music” in Muslcae Scientiae Discussion Forum 3,157-179, 2004

III Mortality, Transience

4.Hildegard Von Bingnen

Roswitha Dabke, “The Hidden Scheme of the Virtues in Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum,” in Parergon, Volume 23, Number 1, 2006, pp. 11-46 

Jennifer Bain, “Hooked on Ecstasy: Performance ‘Practice’ and the Reception

of the Music of Hildegard of Bingen,” 2009

Mozart Don Giovanni

The Don Giovanni Moment ed. Lydia

5.Birtwhistle, Masks of Orpheus

Jonathan Cross‏, Harrison Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus (Rutledge, 2016)

Monteverdi Lamento d’Arianna

Suzanne G. Cusick, “‘There Was Not One Lady Who Failed to Shed a Tear': Arianna's Lament and the Construction of Modern Womanhood,” Early Music, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1994, pp. 21-32+35-38+41-43

6.Mahler, Songs on the Death of Children

Stephen E. Hefling‏, Song of the Earth (Cambridge Handbook, 2000)

7.Verdi Requiem

David Rosen, Verdi Requiem (Cambridge Handbook, 1995)

8.Beethoven. Schubert

Alexander Rehding, “Liszt's Musical Monuments” in 19th-Century Music, Vol. 26 No. 1, Summer 2002; (pp. 52-72)

Scott Burnham, “Schubert and the Sound of Memory”, The Musical Quarterly Vol. 84, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 655-663 

Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (1998)

Laura Tunbridge, ‘Saving Schubert: The Evasions of Late Style’. In Late Style and its Discontents, ed. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Laura Tunbridge, ‘Singing against late style: The Problem of Performance History’. In Schubert’s Late Music in History and Theory, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 426-441

9.Simon Frith, Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music, 1998

10.Gérard Grisey & Joshua Fineberg (2000) “Did you say spectral?” Contemporary Music Review, 19:3, 1-3,  

IV Philosophy

11.Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999)

Stephen Decatur Smith, “Even Money Decays”: Transience and Hope in Adorno, Benjamin, and Wozzeck in The Opera Quarterly, Volume 29, Issue 3-4, 1 December 2013, Pages 212–243, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbt035

12.Lydia Goehr, “Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien—in Thirteen Steps,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 56 No. 3, Fall 2003; (pp. 595-636)

.Class presentations13