3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Early in the 20th century, composers of the “Second Viennese School,” led by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, believed that tonality and Romanticism in western music had gone far enough, and their answer was “atonality,” music written to avoid any formal relation to a central key. In this course, students will learn why atonality largely failed, and why the symphonies of Mahler, “rediscovered” some 50 years after his death in 1911, aided and abetted that failure. Through in-class demonstration and listening, students will discover what tonality means and why it is likely an unavoidable force of nature, and that we, as human beings, naturally seek harmonic structure. The class will study each symphony in numerical order, and the course will end with a field trip to New York City in May 2018 to hear a performance of Mahler’s 10th symphony by the London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle conducting.