I took the Appreciation of Music during the fall semester of my sophomore year. This class was unlike any other class I have taken before. We learned about composers, eras, and different types of music. We even got to take a field trip to Richmond to see an opera.
The main take-away that I obtained from this class is that learning doesn’t always have to take place with paper and pencil and studying doesn’t always consist of memorizing terms and spitting them back out on a test. Many of our quizzes were listening quizzes. Dr. Swanson gave us a playlist of different pieces of music as well as a piece of paper with all of the names and composers on it. Our task was to listen to the music and take notes on what it sounded like. Then, during the quiz, we could use our notes to help us identify the piece of music that he was playing.
These quizzes were unlike any quiz I had ever taken before. Instead of memorizing facts, we had to actually listen to the music and interpret the sounds on our own. I liked this method because I feel as though it was less stressful than cramming information into my brain.
Below, I have included my notes sheets for one of the listening quizzes. These notes are unique from notes in other classes because they are specific to me. Most likely, someone else reading my notes would not be able to identify the music because I wrote down the sounds that I heard and the way that my brain interpreted them is different than anyone else. This concept shows music’s true beauty, in which it can be interpreted in many different ways by many different people.
