MUS 331 - The English Ayre

Course unit(s): 1
Prerequisite(s): MUS 151 Engaging with Music II or permission of the instructor
A study of the English Ayre and its cultural role in late-Elizabethan and Jacobean England. This course will examine the structural and rhetorical practices shared by poets and composers, applying analytical techniques specific to the ayre’s texts, music, and their synthesis as song. These analyses will be placed within the social and political contexts of the period to demonstrate the ways in which the ayre reflected its cultural milieu and articulated social trends. Texts for the course will include treatises on poetic, music-compositional, and performance practices from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and secondary source readings in literary theory and musicology. The analyses of musical, literary, cultural, and performance practices will be applied in weekly practicums in class to create informed performances of the English Ayre repertoire culminating in a concert performed by the class.