The Concept of Late Style in Music

"Late style" is an expression regularly used in music history to distinguish the work of composers as they enter their last phase of composition?often, but not only, in old age. This course looks closely at the musical and biographical contexts in which late-age music was composed, and seeks both to question the assumptions surrounding late style, mortality, and cultural gerontology, and to prompt a more critical understanding of the late/last works of composers and musicians. It will focus primarily on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century examples, but students may choose for their final papers composers from any century for whom the theoretical concept of a "late style" seems applicable. Consideration of "late style" will include discussion of philosophical, psychological, religious, and aesthetic contexts of composition, performance, and interpretation. Students might consider this course if they have an interest in the late works of composers or a more general interest in the relationship between creativity and the course of life.