Bridging Differences

Bridging Differences: Music’s Lessons About Contrasts and Labels

HNRS 301H1

Alan Gosman

Fall 2025

Tuesdays 12:30–1:45 p.m.

MUSC 113

This course will consider a variety of ways that composers first convey contrasts in their music and then break down the traditional formal boundaries that these contrasts or labels might have imposed.  Our focus will be on how interpretations can be formed and shift based on these contrasts and if their elements remain opposed or are found to share some of the same spaces.  The class will also consider the composition sketches for several pieces, including Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Schubert’s Winterreise to observe how contrasts and boundaries sometimes change over the course of the creative process.  Several situations will be explored where a single chord has the ability to shift function, surprise the listener, and lead to different outcomes.  In addition, we will consider instances of later composers “smoothing out” other composers’ compositions that were too jarring for their ears in attempts to limit the extremes that are inherent in contrasts.  The class, along with introducing and studying works by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Clara and Robert Schumann, and Schubert, will allow students the opportunity to choose more recent songs to reflect on the course’s themes. It will be helpful to be able to read music, but no background in music analysis is required.

About Alan Gosman:

Alan Gosman is chair of the Department of Music and professor of music theory.  He has published on Beethoven’s sketchbooks and compositional process, musical form, canons, and links between performance and analysis.  Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Arkansas, he was an associate professor at the University of Michigan, where he was the Director of Graduate Studies in Music Theory. Before that, he taught at Michigan State University and Harvard University.

Alan Gosman’s work on Beethoven includes his book, Beethoven's "Eroica" Sketchbook: A Critical Edition, coauthored with Lewis Lockwood.  He has chapters about Beethoven’s compositional process published in the books Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory: Essays in Honor of Kevin Korsyn, The New Beethoven: Evolution, Analysis, Interpretation, Keys to the Drama: Nine Perspectives on Sonata Forms, and Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater. 

He was involved with several events to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, including the Beethoven Perspectives 2020 Conference Beethoven-Haus Bonn, and the creation of the work “Eroica Sketches: A Reconstruction of the Compositional Process,” in which Robert Levin orchestrated several of Beethoven’s single-staff sketches.  This 30-minute work was performed by the WDR Symphony Orchestra as their 2020 season opener under the direction of Cristian Macelaru.

Alan Gosman contributed a chapter on musical form to the Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory. His articles have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Music Theory, Theory and Practice, Gamut, and Journal of Musicological Research.  Most recently, he has presented at the Society of Music Theory and American Musicological Society National Conference in San Antonio, the New Beethoven Research Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, “Beethoven’s Creative Vision: Journeys and Worlds” in Jerusalem, “Utopian Visions and Visionary Art” in Vienna, and the Boston University Center for Beethoven Research Symposium on Beethoven’s String Quartet in Bb Major, Op. 130.  He has also presented a talk at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland that was arranged by the U.S. State Department through the U.S. Consulate Office and given a lecture at Harvard University's "Performing Beethoven" symposium.