Interdisciplinary Approaches to Musical Time

Music and Theater Arts MIT CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 5 lectures

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of three broad topics concerning music in relation to time. 1. Music as Architecture: the creation of musical shapes in time; 2. Music as Memory: how musical understanding depends upon memory and reminiscence, with attention to analysis of musical structures; and 3. Time as the Substance of Music: how different disciplines such as philosophy and neuroscience view the temporal dimension of musical processes and/or performances. Classroom discussion of these topics is complemented by three weekend concerts with pre-concert forums, jointly presented by the {{% resource_link "663963ce-f18b-4f5a-91ec-c440347cef99" "Boston Chamber Music Society" %}} (BCMS) and MIT Music & Theater Arts.

Syllabus

  1. 1 Class 10: Time and structure in a film score for D. W. Griffith's Ramona (1910)
  2. 2 Class 12: Student project presentation: "Notation and Time in Music"
  3. 3 Time as Shape
  4. 4 Time as Memory
  5. 5 Time as the Subject and Substance

Course materials