In 2025, MUS 726 will have a specific focus: "Interpreting Mozart". This course will guide students through an in-depth exploration of the works of one of classical music's greatest geniuses - a composer whose works are universally performed and included in auditions, and yet often underestimated and misunderstood by young musicians. The aim of this course is to equip students with a fluency in Mozart's language: to allow you to interpret his music in a way that is at once original while being understood through the lens of context and a thorough familiarisation with the historical style and performance practices. This course will develop critical thinking around the questions of how we play music and why.
Major themes of seminars will include creative practice research, music editing (the philosophies, practices, and purposes of it), modes of dissemination, and the meaning of performance (interpretation, attitudes, and individuality).
The course is structured around Mozart's four major late operas: Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, and Die Zauberfloete as well as his last masterpiece, the Requiem. Each work will be used as the basis for exploration over several seminars that will also tie in related instrumental works, the works of Mozart's contemporaries and rivals, and historical performance techniques such as ornamentation and improvisation, period phrasing, articulation, and rubato.
The assignments will be a combination of performance and academic projects. In each, the student is expected to think about, absorb, and apply the knowledge taught in seminars to topics that relate to their own direct musical interests. In this way, a primary aim of the course is to bridge the student's academic learning with the practical aspects of their musical study.