MUSIC 2221 - [Bach and Handel]

(HB) (LA-AS)

Spring. Not offered 2017-2018. 3 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: any 3-credit music course or permission of instructor. Majors may enhance this course with additional content and an extra credit by enrolling concurrently in MUSIC 3901.

D. Yearsley.

Born within weeks of one another in 1685, their birthplaces less than one hundred miles apart in the forests of central Germany, George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach composed extraordinary music spanning the gamut of human experience and grappling with fundamental human concerns (love, death, duty, happiness) with an expressive power that has never been surpassed. Handel was one of the great cosmopolitans of the eighteenth century and his life and works offer a panorama of European baroque culture. Bach by contrast spent his entire life in the region of his birth; yet his music demonstrates a miraculous awareness of the greater world beyond Germany. In this course students will encounter vocal and instrumental masterpieces by each composer taken from opera, the church, the court, and the home; we will explore the meanings of these works in their own time and their continued vibrancy in the twenty-first century.