Global Transformations in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Music

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• Provide an understanding of key developments in twentieth and twenty-first century music-making practices on a global scale.

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Consider music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in social, political and cultural contexts.
• Introduce you to a range of musical idioms that were significant during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
• Improve your skills in writing about music.
• Improve your skills in analytical observation of music

A series of topics will be presented over the semester. Each will examine how a concept and/or practice of music making changed in a specific compositional or geographical context. Examples of topics that may be explored include:

The emergence of new musical idioms and cultural practices

The birth of "British" art music

Music in postcolonial contexts such as Africa, India, Latin America and China

Cultural and aesthetic debates (e.g. serialism vs. neoclassicism, progressive rock vs. punk, modern jazz vs. traditional jazz);

New ways of creating and organising sound (e.g. within electronic music, extended instrumental techniques);

New models and contexts for music-making (e.g. graphic and instruction based scores, improvisation, the studio album);

Theories about listening (e.g. within experimentalism, music concrete, soundscape composition);

New forms of rhythmic complexity (e.g. within heavy metal, new complexity composition, minimalism)

Non-European/North American "avant-garde" musics

Global jazz

Music and political movements (such as Civil Rights in the United States or Nationalism in Latin America and/or Africa)

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include

Lectures

Seminars

Individual tutorials by arrangement

Learning activities include

Individual study and listening

Library-based research

On-line based research

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

Michael Nyman (2011). Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Cambridge Univ. Press.

John Cage (1973). Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan University Press.

Andrew Ford (1997). Illegal Harmonies. Black Inc.

James Saunders (editor) (2009). The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Ashgate.

Paul Griffiths (1995). Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945. OUP.

Joseph Auner (2013). Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Alex Ross (2009). The Rest is Noise. Harper Perennial.

Paul Griffiths (1994). A Concise History of Modern Music. Thames and Hudson.

Robert P. Morgan (1993). Modern Times: From World War I to the Present. Macmillan.

Assessment strategy

Include details of the proportion and weighting of coursework as well as the number, type and duration of examination(s). You must specify which element will be taken as the final assessment.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External