Origins of Western Music: From Antiquities to Baroque

This course traces how Western music evolved from the modal chants of antiquity and the Roman liturgy through the birth of polyphony, the rhythmic experiments of Ars nova, and the Franco-Flemish masters who shaped the Renaissance soundworld. You'll work through Burkholder and the Norton Anthology week by week, give a midterm presentation, write a final paper, and sit a cumulative final, learning to listen analytically and place repertoire in its historical context. As the first half of the standard two-semester music history sequence, it gives you the vocabulary and chronological frame you'll need before tackling the Baroque-through-modern survey, and it underpins later work in theory, analysis, and performance practice.