Women and Music (MUSL 200)

Music history is more than just the study of "Dead White Men Who Wrote Music." In this "cultural history" course we will look at the various roles women have played in the development of Western music: performers (including opera divas, rock stars, and touring violinists), composers (such as chant composer and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, Pulitzer Prize-winning Ellen Zwilich, and Amy Beach), patrons (Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of the "Poisoning Pope," and American donor Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who endowed the concert hall at the Library of Congress) and educators (including the figure of the "spinster piano teacher" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). In addition to biographical information, we will consider the social and economic factors that have influenced women's position in relation to music. Why, for instance, do girls play flute and boys play trumpet--and why is the question itself misleading?

You don't need to read music to take MUSL 200, but you should be familiar with the style periods of classical Western music or have taken MUSL 140 or MUSL 141.

"Combines just the right amount of lecturing and structure with free discussion."
--former student, on a course evaluation form

Credit?
Arts and Science--CPLE humanities
Engineering--humanities
Peabody--humanities

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