3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

From Beethoven to Beyoncé, musicians have been arranging songs into themed collections for more than two hundred years. These collections tell stories and explore poetic ideas, and they often provide windows into how subjective experiences and transformations have been understood and expressed in various historical contexts. This course explores the related genres of song cycles and concept albums from the early 1800s through the present day. In addition to Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and Beyoncé’s Lemonade, we will analyze song cycles by composers such as Schubert, Schumann, Chausson, Mahler, Elgar, and Schoenberg, and concept albums by Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Pink Floyd, and others. Throughout, the emphasis will be on the relationship between music and text, and the complex interactions between works of music and their cultural, social, and political contexts.