Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Studies
- Code
- BBI-ANG17-312E.12
- Title
- Elective seminar in English literature - Unanswered Questions: Musical and Poetic Syntax
- Usual semester
- Spring
- ECTS
- 5
- Language
- Learning outcomes
- The aim of this course is to establish a meaningful and theoretically useful link or bridge between music, mathematics, and literature, with particular regard to poetry and its language, whose syntax shows some interesting parallels with – and striking differences from – that of music and composition. An outcome concomitant with the above will be a better understanding of music (classical and beyond, in all its manifestations of vocal, instrumental, and electronic composition) and some new readings in English-language literatures.
- Course content
- The Unanswered Question is a musical piece by Charles Ives as well as the title of a lecture series (and a related book) by Leonard Bernstein. Listening to the former and reading the latter, we will investigate various aspects of musical composition and how literature has been set to music and how music has occasionally been translated into literature. Bernstein’s lectures touch on a plethora of musical examples, which will also be studied and, sometimes, analyzed beyond the scope of his own presentations.
- Assessment method
- Weekly instalments of listening to music and reading music-related articles. Bernstein’s six lectures will be covered in two-week instalments. Students should train themselves to recognize musical styles and milestones as well as gain some skills in describing the syntax of music and the experience that can be gained from it. For these purposes, there will be several quizzes, short essay assignments, and project work will be encouraged.
- Bibliography
- Bernstein, Leonard. The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976. [Lectures available on YouTube.] Copland, Aaron. Music and Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1953. – – –. What to Listen to in Music? [1938, 1957]. New American Library, 2009. MacDonald, Matthew. Breaking Time’s Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2014. Sherwood Magee, Gayle. Charles Ives: A Research and Information Guide. 2nd ed. London & New York: Routledge, 2010.