They come in, many of them, not knowing their Bach from their Brahms. They leave, many of them, stocking their CD collections with some Wagner and Verdi to accompany their Radiohead, Moby and U2 albums. Cumming knows that plenty of teens and twentysomethings haven't had much exposure to classical music. It's just as important as gaining an appreciation for literature or art, but it's less likely that students have had an opportunity to study Western classical music in the same way. Cumming is the course's coordinator, overseeing the work of the PhD music students who teach the class as well as doing much of the teaching herself.
People tend to put on music and switch off their brains.
We want them to listen in an active way. We establish a vocabulary for talking about music. Over the course of a semester, as they listen to recordings spanning the Middle Ages to the 20th century, students learn to identify a meter, to categorize genres and to classify shifting patterns in orchestral compositions. Students in the course have to go to two classical music concerts. They write reports comparing two of the pieces performed and describing what the concert experience was like as a whole.