MUS31490

Learning Outcomes:

– Explain and appraise different current scholarly models for:
o characterising pre-modern understandings of sexuality.
o analysing the interactions between music and sexuality.
– Analyse primary sources (in English) and summarise the evidence they provide about historical understandings of sexuality and its relation to music.
– Analyse individual songs or operatic scenes, evaluating how they inflect our understanding of the relationship between music and sexuality.
– Evaluate the connections between music and sexuality in pre-modern European musical cultures from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries.

Indicative Module Content:

Week 1: Understanding Pre-Modern Sexuality and its Links to Music.

Troubadours and Trouvères

Week 2: Representation: Depicting sexual desire in song.
Week 3: Monday – Bank holiday for St Brigid’s day. Thursday – Representation.
Week 4: Regulation: Managing musical and sexual behaviour.
Week 5: Scripting: Using song in real-life desiring encounters.
Week 6: Thinking about Sexuality in Troubadour and Trouvère Song


Seventeenth-Century Opera
Week 7: Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Opera
(Weeks 8 & 9: 2 weeks of study period)

Week 10: Individual presentations on primary sources.

Week 11: Representation: Desire on the operatic stage.
Week 12: Regulation: Sexualised Women on and off the Stage
Week 13: Scripting: Opera and society

Week 14: Monday – Bank holiday for Easter Monday; Thursday – Transhistorical comparisons: Opportunities and problems

Student Effort Hours:

Approaches to Teaching and Learning:

Lecture and seminar teaching with extensive opportunities for discussion.
Group analysis of primary sources.

Requirements, Exclusions and Recommendations

Not applicable to this module.

Module Requisites and Incompatibles

Not applicable to this module.
 

Assessment Strategy

 

Please see Student Jargon Buster for more information about remediation types and timing. 

Feedback Strategy/Strategies

• Feedback individually to students, on an activity or draft prior to summative assessment
• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment
• Peer review activities

How will my Feedback be Delivered?

Presentation: In preparation for the presentation in week 10, students should choose one of the primary sources studied in weeks 1-5. At the end of week 5, they should submit their choice and briefly outline their approach to it, on which they will receive written formative feedback. Also, during the 1-hour classes in which we analyse primary sources, every student will act as the spokesperson for their group at least once, presenting their group’s analysis of the primary source on which they are working. They will be given formative oral feedback on that presentation, to help them prepare for their summative assessed presentation. Essay: Students will submit a proposal for their essay by the end of week 7. They will receive written formative feedback on this proposal.

Cusick, Suzanne G. Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power. 1st ed. Vol. 156. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009;2015;.
Heller, Wendy. Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003;2004;.
Leach, Elizabeth Eva. "Do Trouvère Melodies Mean Anything?" Music Analysis 38, no. 1-2 (2019): 3-46.
Leach, Elizabeth Eva. Medieval Sex Lives : The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023.
McClary, Susan. Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. doi:10.1525/california/9780520247345.001.0001.
Karras, Ruth Mazo. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. London; New York;: Routledge, 2005.
Kay, Sarah. Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Quinlan, Meghan. "When Courtly Song Invades History: Lyricizing Blanche De Castille." In Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song, edited by Rachel May Golden and Katherine Kong. 1st ed., 93: University Press of Florida, 2021.
Rosand, Ellen. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1991.
Rosenberg, Samuel N, Margaret Louise Switten, and Gérard Le Vot. “Songs of the troubadours and trouvères : an anthology of poems and melodies.” New York ; Garland, 1998.
Rosow, Lois. "Power and Display: Music in Court Theatre." In The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, edited by Carter, Tim and John Butt, 197-240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Thomson, Matthew P. "Song, Dance, and Sex: The Social Role of the Carole in Thirteenth-Century Clerical Thought and Vernacular Literature." Music & Letters 105, no. 2 (2024): 153-176.

Timetabling information is displayed only for guidance purposes, relates to the current Academic Year only and is subject to change.