Is there any musical form more familiar than the love song? Is there any human experience more mysterious than its topic? This seminar uses a broad collection of love songs to investigate the concept of love, and uses the concept of love to investigate a broad collection of love songs. From the Biblical Solomon to medieval troubadours to 19th-century lieder to Taylor Swift, love has remained a perennial focus for composers. But ideas of love---not to mention related things like marriage, family, sex, gender, sexuality, and happiness---have changed radically. How have love songs revealed or resisted or disguised these transformations? What have they taught us about love? What else have they taught us? Can they be trusted? Do they really speak of love, or only of desire? Do they tell us what these experiences are? Or rather what we want them to be? Are they maybe even speaking about entirely other matters? We will attend closely to individual songs, listening for the details that evade more casual notice. We will also attend to large amounts of songs from a distance, looking for the patterns that only emerge from afar. We will enrich our theoretical perspectives by reading and discussing works of history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Hopefully, we will revise---potentially radically---our understandings of both music and love, and therefore of ourselves.
3 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
Is there any musical form more familiar than the love song? Is there any human experience more mysterious than its topic? This seminar uses a broad collection of love songs to investigate the concept of love, and uses the concept of love to investigate a broad collection of love songs. From the Biblical Solomon to medieval troubadours to 19th-century lieder to Taylor Swift, love has remained a perennial focus for composers. But ideas of love---not to mention related things like marriage, family, sex, gender, sexuality, and happiness---have changed radically. How have love songs revealed or resisted or disguised these transformations? What have they taught us about love? What else have they taught us? Can they be trusted? Do they really speak of love, or only of desire? Do they tell us what these experiences are? Or rather what we want them to be? Are they maybe even speaking about entirely other matters? We will attend closely to individual songs, listening for the details that evade more casual notice. We will also attend to large amounts of songs from a distance, looking for the patterns that only emerge from afar. We will enrich our theoretical perspectives by reading and discussing works of history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Hopefully, we will revise---potentially radically---our understandings of both music and love, and therefore of ourselves.
Offered in Winter 2027 at Stanford University.