This will be a frequently recurring theme. Music Appreciation, both as a class and a concept, is something I very much champion. Teaching it for six semesters in graduate school gave me a completely new perspective on this leper of musical academia. As a whole, scholars and performers dislike the topic, as it means instructing non-majors. On the other hand, students generally hate the class as they expect it to be an easy 4.0, only to find out they need to know the ins and outs of sonata form, and are beaten over the head with the cement baton of classical music (along with a brief, obligatory mention of jazz). Both parties generally walk away dissatisfied; the disgruntled professor insisting the students weren’t appreciative enough, and the confused student questioning the relevance of any of the course material.

The system requires much change, and the development of a comprehensive, accessible (but challenging), and relevant curriculum is something I’ve been working on for a few months. Bit by bit, and in no particular order, I’ll regularly address this topic, offering my thoughts on methods to improve this subject, as it could be a way to improve relations between musical academia and the general population at large. Educators must consider themselves ambassadors for musicians at large when teaching Music Appreciation, and aware that their performance in the classroom will reflect on the entire academic music community. Since Obama took office in January, pundits have dubbed him “Explainer in Chief”; one who must take a complex problem, distill it to its core, and explain it to the general population in a manner that is both easy to understand, yet detailed enough to garner respect. Perhaps the students needn’t learn about sonata form’s tendency to emphasize the relationship between tonic and dominant, but instead the importance of form overall, and its many creative implementations, and its relation to creative uses of common forms in popular music. (This is something I often emphasize in my own classroom.)

I frequently hear musicians complaining that, overall, people don’t care about classical music, or simply don’t give it chance. Before playing the victim, academia must first ask itself: have we given the average listener a chance?