Module description
The body of scholarship on Britten and his music has grown rapidly in recent years, both within and beyond musicology. This seminar will function as an introduction to major themes in Britten's work, and to issues and approaches in the study of mid-20th-century music beyond the avant-garde. It will also seek to integrate musicological approaches with literary criticism, art history and cultural studies. How does Britten's music intersect with contemporary literature and visual culture? How might it relate to some of the questions that animate British cultural studies, particularly around the issues of modernism and mass culture, Englishness and empire, family, sexuality and citizenship? While exploring these questions, we'll address shifting approaches to modernism and its others, and will develop critical tools applicable to a range of post-1945 music
Assessment details
100% 4000 word essay
Educational aims & objectives
To survey the music of and scholarship on Benjamin Britten, with special attention to central issues and approache s in British cultural studies as well as standard musicological accounts. We will begin with debates about sexuality by looking at Britten's opera Peter Grimes as well as readings by Brett (on Britten), Hornsey (on debates about homosexuality in mid - 20th - century London) and Houlbrook (Queer London). We will then look at Britten's treatment of themes of innocence and guilt in the context of the Second World War, by way of The Holy Sonnets of John Donne and The Rape of Lucretia. Next we will examine issues of citizenship and the welfare state in the late 1940s and 1950s through Britten's educational music as well as Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy and T. H. Marshall's 'Citizenship and Social Class' (1949). Citizenship will continue to be at issue as we look at debates about Englishness and mass culture in the 1950s by way of Britten's Noye's Fludde, two recent books by Esty and Abravanel and primary sources by Leavis and Keynes. Musical language and Britten's relationship to the post - WW2 musical avant - garde will be at issue as we engage in a close reading of The Turn of the Screw (1954). We'll look at the song cycles Winter Words (1953) and Songs and Proverbs of William Blake (1965) in order to explore the status of 19th - century visionary and anti - industrial themes in the late twentieth century. Looking at the War Requiem, we'll address issues of Cold War pacifism, post - World War II memorials and issues of musical and textual irony. Finally, building on some themes in the War Requiem, we'll explore the workings of ritual in music through Curlew River, readings on this work and theoretical literature on ritual; and we'll explore Britten's engagements with Asian culture in the context of both decolonization and the Cold War.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module students will be conversant with Britten's musical language and with central themes and concerns in his work, including themes of innocence and guilt; pacifism and international cooperation; concerns with citizenship, English traditions and education; and the possibility of alternatives to the avant - garde. They will also have become conversant with central issues and approaches in British cultural studies post - 1945; these include issues of citizenship and the welfare state, anxieties about the fate of Englishness within mass culture, issues of decolonization and Cold War alliances, debates about homosexuality and the shape of urban life in post - WW2 London, the aftermath of World War Two and the Cold War. Through assigned reading and listening as well as discussion, students will master a body of musical works and secondary literature on Britten, while also developing music - analytical tools and critical tools which can be more broadly applied to music of the twentieth century. They will also be asked to develop new approaches to this music and issues raised in it by engaging with primary and secondary literature outside musicology which is not generally applied to these works. Engaging with this diverse body of scholarship will enable students to think independently about the existing critical literature on Britten's music and to develop new connections between music and other cultural phenomena of this period, as well as teaching students to navigate between the conventions and concerns of different disciplines. All of these new skills and methods will put to use and tested in a final research paper.
Teaching pattern
Weekly 2 hour seminars