Humanities, University of Southampton

This course aims to introduce you to some of the major musical forms, techniques and styles cultivated between 1500 and 1750. In addition, the course uses these materials as a springboard to improve your basic music-analytical skills and to help you develop your ability to write about music.

Co-ordinator:  Dr Tom Irvine

This course covers Western music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, with an emphasis on listening and general style characteristics and on the acquisition of basic analytical and writing skills.

Lectures provide “snapshots” of genres such as the polyphonic Mass, the madrigal, the sonata, the concerto, the cantata and opera seria. Follow-up tutorials allow for a detailed look at individual pieces of music and/or practice of related analytical or writing skills.

The main materials of the course are a linked set of recordings (available on CD and online), score anthologies, and listening guide which provide a programme of listening and study for the entire semester; lectures will be built around the same pieces included in the set, allowing for group discussion and analysis of the materials learned in independent study.

A two-hour lecture and a two-hour small group tuition, alternating fortnightly.

• Relevant sections in Donald J. Grout and Claude Palisca, A History of Western Music, 6th ed.
• Allan W. Atlas, Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600 (New York: Norton, 1998)
• Claude Palisca, Baroque Music, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1991).
  David Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Trevor Herbert, Music in Words: A Guide to Researching and Writing about Music (London: The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 2001).

• Three short written assignments (each worth 20%)
• One examination (40%)