MUSIC 7232 - History and Criticism

Spring. 4 credits.

A. Richards.

Topic: C.P.E. Bach and the 18th-century Aesthetics of the Sublime and Sentimental

C. P. E. Bach has been both celebrated and criticised for remarkable originality and brilliant idiosyncracy. One of the most famous of European composers in the later 18th century, his reputation went into a steady decline in the 19th and his music is only recently coming to be better known - as the first complete edition of his works nears completion. A composer whose friendship circle included artists, writers and philosophers as much as it did other musicians, his oeuvre speaks to a lively engagement with contemporary thought - both in the context of enlightenment Berlin in the first part of his career, and independent, commercial Hamburg in the later part of his life. This course takes the music of C. P. E. Bach, especially the keyboard works and the relatively little known choral music and songs, as the starting point for an exploration of music aesthetics in 18th-century Germany, with a focus on the urgently-debated, and intricately interlocking, concepts of the sentimental and the sublime. Alongside C. P. E. Bach we will encounter musical works by Handel, Telemann, Reichardt, Neefe, Graun and Haydn, and critical texts by Mendelssohn, Sulzer, Cramer, Herder, and others.