GLS Adds Three New Courses to Spring Lineup

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October 24, 2017

Graduate Liberal Studies will roll out three new seminars in the Spring 2018 term.

Pianist R. Larry Todd, Arts and Sciences Professor of Music in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, will teach "Discovering Music." The long arc of Western music has traced a rich history from the Middle Ages to the present marked by recurring cycles of tradition and innovation, consolidation, and renewal. "Discovering Music" offers an introduction to this history by focusing on selected works for listening and discussion, ranging from an anonymous chant of the fifth century to a violin concerto by the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina from our own century.  Beginning with a review of the basic elements of Western music (pitch, rhythm, texture, dynamics, and timbre), the course will proceed chronologically from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods, and twentieth-century modernism and post-modernism, tracing how Western music evolved as it became increasingly complex and emancipated. Along the way, we will consider many of the principal composers who, each in their own way, contributed to this history, why their music is significant, and how to listen to it.  Among these composers, to mention a few, are Hildegard of Bingen, Machaut, Josquin, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, J. S. Bach, G. F. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Amy Beach, Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Leonard Bernstein. For more information about "Discovering Music," watch our course preview videos.

In "Classic Italian Film" with Frank Lentricchia, Katharine Everett Gilbert Professor Emeritus of Literature, students will view and discuss some of the most powerful and influential films ever made. They cover a revolutionary period of “neo-realism” from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, beginning with documentary-like revelations of lower class struggles (De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves) which present lives determined and undermined by harsh economic conditions, to films which move to highly imaginative explorations of subjective interiors (Fellini’s 8 1/2) and cultural and psychological terrain inaccessible to strictly realist techniques. This course will focus on how the actual visual image is crafted to shape and reveal the film-maker’s intention to tell stories that cannot be told by strictly literary means. 

Abdul Sattar Shakhly, Visiting Professor of the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, will teach "Mystical Literature." This seminar explores and examines the tradition of mysticism in literature of world, British, and American writers. The objective is to introduce students to numerous genres and literary works that manifest a deep religious attitude or experience as a way of life and cross-cultural phenomenon. The course will focus on selected works of Dante, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, and American Transcendentalists and their predecessors in Muslim Spain, such as Ibn Arabi, Abu Al Ala’a Al Ma’arri, and Rumi among other Sufi poets. Close readings of texts will reveal the recurrent theme: “the direct, intuitional experience of God through unifying love."

Registration for Spring 2018 opens on November 1. Click here for more information on these and other GLS seminars.