The 'long nineteenth century’ was first defined by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm as the period of Western History between the beginnings of the French Revolution (1789) and the First World War (1914).  It also witnessed the hey-day of global European Empires and the rise of the United States of America as a global power. But it also neatly encapsulates the high point of the Western Art Music tradition we know today as ‘Classical Music’, or, more specifically, the 'Classic-Romantic Era', from the stylistic triumphs of the First Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, to the end of common-practice tonality in the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. In addition, it saw the rise of mass popular musical culture, the beginnings of jazz, and the development of many of the key features of the modern music industry as we know it today.

This course will give students the opportunity to better understand not just the traditional notions of ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ music, but also the interplay between such music and wider historical narratives that have come profoundly to shape the ways we hear, and understand, Western musical culture.