One Day University: 5000 Years of History (Los Angeles, CA)
Music as a Mirror of History: 300 Years in 60 Minutes
Robert Greenberg / UC Berkeley / SF Performances
This presentation examines Western music as an artistic phenomenon that mirrors the social, political, spiritual and economic realities of its time. As such, the ongoing changes in musical style evident in Western music during the last millennia are a function of large-scale societal change and are not due to any particular composer’s “creative muse.” Starting with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the intellectual and spiritual climate of the High Baroque (ca. 1720), this program will observe the changes wrought by Enlightenment society on the music of the Classical Era (ca. 1780) as manifested in the work of Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. This class will observe the impact of the Age of Revolution and Napoleon through a lens provided by the radical and experimental music of Ludwig van Beethoven (ca. 1810).
Other topics to be explored include the nature and conception of “the composer”, Beethoven’s gastro-intestinal problems (not pretty, but relevant), architecture and landscape design in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the applicability of the concept of “music as a mirror” to American popular music of the 1950s and 1960s.