Historical Sound Studies Seminar Syllabus

How does history sound? What kind of historical document is music? What does it mean to study past music as music, and what do we learn when we think of past music as sound? In this seminar, we will take up these questions together, applying them to the sounds of Europe—musical and otherwise—in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750. While music historians commonly understand this period to encompass the decline of the Renaissance and the flowering of the Baroque, we will draw on the (inter-) discipline of sound studies to understand this as an intellectual and perceptual shift: from sounding number to sounding sound. Together, we will work to develop a methodology for using music and sound to write history. If, as has recently been argued (Missfelder 2015), sound history is also the history of hearing, what is our archive? Whose ears, and whose voices, does “sound history”-as-“hearing history” help us uncover