Module description
This module explores a selected topic in music and/or musical culture(s) during the long eighteenth century, examining a central movement, theme, place, institution, composer or other musical figure; and the social and aesthetic issues with which they engaged.
In 2025-26, this unit explores the history and theory of musical expression. Though culminating in the aesthetic debates of the long eighteenth century, it sketches a longer history, from antiquity to the present. In the first five weeks, we frame the eighteenth-century, reviewing a range of theories of musical emotion from both 'before' and 'after' this period – from music of the spheres to current music psychology. In the second five weeks, in a series of case studies, we ask how musical emotions were conceptualised in the long eighteenth century, and to what purpose they were directed. We work with the hypothesis that the eighteenth employed musical emotions to awaken, but also to discipline, the human subject. There was, broadly speaking, a rehabilitation of embodied feeling and sensation as part of projects to have knowledge of, influence, educate, and control human subjects. Studying this topic is not straightforward. The history of musical emotions involves changing vocabulary for ‘emotion’ itself and changing theories of how music elicits or represents feelings. Though musical emotions contributed to the formation of identities, and played a part in theories of social order, an approach through identity politics, and ideology critique, is doomed to fail. There is a need to work as both historians and anthropologists, and to acknowledge the limits of what can be known about the experience of music on the basis of surviving evidence. Lectures will consider how older rhetorical-physiological notions of the affections as relatively static and constituted by bodily humours gave way from the 1740s to newer nerve-based theories of sensation and sentiment predicated on constant fluctuation in intensity and type; how, in the 1760s, an increasing emphasis was placed upon effects of emotional realism and on immersive identification – a development linked to the rise of sensibility in the opera house and instrumental music; and how, throughout the century, instrumental music was scrutinised for its capacity to articulate and rouse feelings.
Assessment details
- Critical Commentary (15%)
- Essay (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
To provide a sophisticated understanding of central issues in music and musical culture during the long eighteenth century, in relation to social, political and artistic changes in the period.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practical skills appropriate to a Level 6 module and in particular will be able to demonstrate:
- A sophisticated, in-depth understanding of an important aspect of musical culture during the long eighteenth century
- A critical knowledge of and ability to evaluate the connections between that aspect of musical culture and contemporary political, social and artistic life
- The ability to conduct independent research in eighteenth-century music