STSC 418 Instruments of Music and Science
Cross-listed as MUSC 750
Offered:Spring 2008
Tresch & Dolan F 2-5
Capstone Course
The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the invention of many new instruments in both music and science. They were sometimes made by the same people, and they were often understood to have the same purpose: to attune individuals to the rhythms, proportions, and harmonies of nature. This seminar draws connections between music, science, politics, ethics and aesthetics between 1750 and 1850, a crucial point in European history. We’ll examine the role of instruments in conceptions of nature, society, and the individual, traversing the clockwork regularity of the Enlightenment, the turbulent longings of Romanticism, and the spooky delirium of the fantastic. The course begins with light refracting through prisms; it ends with the blaring trombones of Berlioz’s opium-induced Symphonie Fantastique; along the way we will visit ideas of mechanical
observation, mimesis, theories of the passions, global science, demonic virtuosity, phantasmagoria, the uncanny, and the paradoxes of bourgeois selfhood. Through working with actual instruments and reading primary texts, students will be invited to question basic assumptions of intellectual history. The class is open to creative undergraduates and graduates from any field who want to explore a range of ideas of what it means to be human in the modern world.
