Week 0 (Introduction): What Philosophy and Literature Do—And How They Connect

• Understanding the disciplines and their relationship to music

• No required reading

Week 1: What is Music? The Nature of Musical Beauty

• Plato, The Republic (selections on music education)

• Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (on music)

Week 2: The Romantic Ideal—Poetry and Music as Sister Arts

• E.T.A. Hoffmann, "Beethoven's Instrumental Music"

• Walter Pater, The Renaissance ("Conclusion")

Week 3: Nietzsche—The Birth of Tragedy and the Dionysian Artist

• Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Sections 1-2, 5, 16)

Week 4: Formalism and Autonomy—Music as Pure Structure

• Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful (Chapters 1-2)

• Clive Bell, "The Aesthetic Hypothesis"

Week 5: Music in Literature—Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

• Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (selections on music and composition)

• T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets" - "Burnt Norton"

Week 6: The Ethics of Performance—Authenticity and Interpretation

• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

• Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation"

Week 7: Mind, Body, and Performance—Phenomenology and Flow

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (excerpts)

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience"

Week 8: The Meaning of Music—Why We Play

• Tolstoy, "What is Art?" (selections)

• Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (selections on creativity and meaning)