Topic Description

Intertextual borrowing is varied, rich, and prominent in music making, whether that is in the form of direct quotation from pre-existing works, cover versions, remixes, mash-ups, adaptations, parodies, revision of sketches and orchestrations etc. This module explores how and why specific musical texts reveal or declare their relationship to other specific texts showing how music producers re-create materials to suit different situations, sometimes crossing historical, geographical or cultural divides. Focusing on the relationships between repetition and difference, and familiarity and novelty as sources of pleasure for both knowing and unknowing and audiences, a series of lectures and seminars will underpin a range of theoretical concepts relevant to the study of reinvented texts. Questions of fidelity, originality, authenticity and identity will form the heart of this discussion. Students will submit an essay and will also deliver an assessed presentation on an agreed and appropriate aspect of reinvention.

Module Description

Through a structured series of lectures, seminars and presentations, students will examine the nature of music in the context of the other arts and explore the character of musical form and identity. In discussing music, terms are often applied to it which have become, through over use, taken for granted. What, for example, do we mean when we describe a musical work as Baroque, neo-Classical or Impressionistic? What is it for a piece to have ‘form’ and what would a work without form be like? In considering these issues music from a range of musical periods and cultures will be examined, in order to place it within an appropriate historical, cultural and aesthetic framework. Delivery of the course will be supported by a number of guest lectures from experts in related fields and also by group visits to relevant concerts, exhibitions and talks at local museums and art galleries. Each delivery of the module will offer one or more options drawn from an advertised list. Options may include: Music, Form and Identity; Music-Text-Voices, Music of the Spheres; Reinventions. Assessment comprises a mid-semester presentation and a prepared essay.