This intensive course is designed to appeal to graduate musicologists, historians (European history, cultural history, history of ideas), music lovers, and music students. The course elaborates late-eighteenth century aesthetic categories and frameworks which provided not only a basis for argument about judgements of musical value, but also formed part of the structures of musico-rhetorical explanation, interpretation and expectation commonly held by late-eighteenth century musical connoisseurs.

The musical elements of irregularity, temporal displacement, ambiguity, interruption and self-referentiality will be used to reveal aesthetic commonalities between the free fantasias of C.P.E. Bach and eighteenth century English garden architecture.

Haydn?s ?Creation?, late vocal music, and ?London? symphonies will be used to expose the aesthetic currents which not only formed the expectations of Haydn?s audiences, but which became catalysts for the intensification of Haydn?s musical rhetoric.

This course reaffirms the centrality of the fantastical gesture in late-eighteenth century instrumental music through an interdisciplinary approach that combines the visual, the literary, and the musical.

Curriculum:

• Aesthetic currents in Haydn?s ?Creation?, late vocal music, and London symphonies;
• The free fantasias of C.P.E. Bach and eighteenth century English garden architecture;
• The picturesque sketch and instrumental music;
• Proto-Romanticism: solitude and the cult of the clavichord.

24 hours of lectures (please contact course coordinator for class schedule)