Music in Europe during the Age of the Enlightenment

This course traces how European music between roughly 1700 and 1800 absorbed Enlightenment ideas about reason, naturalness, and public taste — moving from the late Baroque world of Bach, Handel, and Rameau through the operatic reforms of Gluck and the Italian buffa tradition into the mature Classical style of Haydn and Mozart. You'll work through scores and recordings from the Norton Anthology alongside Burkholder's textbook, write a paper and give a presentation tying stylistic shifts to their social and political context, with weekly quizzes and homeworks keeping you accountable to the listening. As a third-year requirement, it sits between the Baroque survey behind you and the Romantic-era courses ahead, giving you the analytical vocabulary — sonata form, opera seria vs. buffa, galant style — that the rest of your music-history sequence assumes you already own.