MUS 402
Bach's Legacy
Last Offered Spring 2016
Division I Writing Skills
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This seminar, the culminating course in the music major, examines how composers after Bach have engaged and responded to his legacy. We will trace the course of the Classical and early Romantic period “Bach Revival” through Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, and explore how he was venerated in the later Romantic era by Brahms and Busoni. Our main focus, however, will be on how composers of the modern era have viewed him and used his music. We will explore the pertinence of Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” for understanding the ways in which contemporary classical composers ranging from Schoenberg and Webern through Peter Maxwell Davies and George Crumb engage Bach’s music, and consider both the musical techniques and meanings of reworkings and quotations of Bach’s music in jazz and popular styles.