MUSIC 4325 - Musician Biographies: Re-assessing a Genre

(LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with MUSIC 7325.

A. Madrid.

Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 biography of Johann Sebastian Bach not only helped cement the idea of the composer from Eisenach as a musical “genius” but also, arguably, signaled the birth of musikwissenschaft (musicology) as an authoritative scholarly field. From the discipline’s inception through the 1990s, biographical studies thrived through the most important epistemological transformations of musicology as a field of studies. However, at a moment when critical music research moves away from celebrating “great men,” reproducing Eurocentric teleology, and embracing grand historical narratives, the genre has lost its popularity. By critically engaging classic as well as recent music biographical literature this class seeks to interrogate the genre, its current transformations, and its future viability as music scholarship opens to modes of inquiry from ethnomusicology, popular music studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and performance studies.