Curtis Institute of Music - Music History II

Second Semester (1945-2019)

Spring 2019 syllabus

Source Readings:
And Don't Call Them 'Lady' Composers (Pauline Oliveros)
​Experimental Music (John Cage)
​Improvised Music after 1950 - Afrological and Eurological Perspectives (George E. Lewis)
​Metamorphoses of Musical Form (Gyorgy Ligeti)
Music as a Gradual Process (Steve Reich)
Polystylistic Tendencies in Modern Music (Alfred Schnittke)
​The Soul's Messenger (Meredith Monk)
​Who Cares If You Listen (Milton Babbitt)

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First Semester (1850-1945)

Source Readings for Unit 1:

Eduard Hanslick - On the Beautiful in Music (1854)
Frederick Douglass - My Bondage and My Freedom (1885)
Hermann Helmholtz - On the Sensations of Tone (1877)
Richard Wagner - On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems (1857)
​Amy Fay - Music-Study in Germany (1880)


Source Readings for Unit 2:

Charles Ives - "Music and Its Future"
Edgard Varese - "The Liberation of Sound"
Ethel Smyth - "An Open Secret"
Igor Stravinsky - "Some Ideas about My Octuor"
William Grant Still - "Horizons Unlimited"