MUSC 224 (Honors) – Music Appreciation
MUSC 224 is the course that I took to complete the Aesthetic Expression pillar of the Civitae core curriculum. The course was an honors course and it was taught by Dr. Christopher Swanson. To be quite honest, I was not looking forward to taking Music Appreciation, I thought it would be closer to a music history class, which is a subject that I am not very passionate about. However, over the course of the semester, I found that the course was much more than music history. In the class, we dove into classic pieces of music and analyzed their form and organization, as well as pointed out certain features of the music that make them so iconic. We also learned about influential musical composers and focused on pieces of music that are still influencing music today.
The course as a whole has changed the way that I listen to music. We learned quite a bit about HOW to listen to music, which is a vastly different process than I usually take. I think that the class has put me more in tune with the way music makes me feel. Prior to MUSC 224, I listened to music just for what it was, I never did too much thinking about how the music made me feel. But during MUSC 224, I was tasked with describing how certain pieces of music made me feel, which made me think about the entire musical process in a different way.
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Open in new tab The artifact that I chose for this class is a paper that we wrote on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This paper is very different from any other paper I have written. For this paper, we had to take the information we had learned and present it in a more creative manner. We were to present the information from a first person perspective of a person going to the debut of the concert. I found this paper to be challenging. I am not used to writing very creatively (or in the first-person for that matter), and found that I knew what information to use, but it toook me a little longer to adapt it to the specifications of the assignment.