The Appreciation of Music [MUSC 224]
The Appreciation of Music is a class I took to satisfy the fourth general education requirement every Longwood student must fulfill in order to graduate. This course focused on music in politics and vice versa because my university hosted the United States’ only Vice Presidential Debate the semester I took this class. To learn more about my experience with my The Appreciation of Music class, visit the Goal 4 – The Appreciation of Music page under my General Education Courses tab.
One of the things that made this class an Honors course is how in-depth we were able to delve into specific instances of how music affects people’s views on politics. A great example of this is the Music in Movies project each student had to do at some point during the semester. At the beginning of the semester, we were split into group of 3-4 students. Each group was assigned a movie that had something to do with politics or a political figure, sometimes factual, other times fictional. Our professor assigned himself a movie and did the project himself first, to model what he expected of us. Each group had to watch their assigned music and analyze the score. Then, the group had to present any “themes” they discovered in the music and explain any historical or thematic significance they had to the characters, time period, or anything else in the movie (a sad moment, suspenseful moment, foreshadowing, etc.).
This project took hours and hours (and hours!) of hard work and dedication, especially for me who does not exactly have the best “ear” for analyzing music (despite my simple enjoyment of almost all music). My group was assigned the movie Lee Daniels’ The Butler. After a mid-project conference with my professor who told our group that we were basically only barely on the right track and who also gave us some redirection, I was very proud of how much more appreciation I gained of music and its influence on people’s opinions. My class and I came to the realization that in movies and TV shows is not the only place where music can change one’s opinion of someone, something, a time period, a place, etc; political ads on the radio and on TV can have the exact same effect.
Expanding on this, I have come to the realization that it is so important to form opinions based on information that does not tug at emotional heartstrings, or at least to analyze sources of information that include emotional triggers like music while taking into consideration that they do, in fact, include them. Soft background music can influence people much more significantly than many people realize, and studying this fact for a semester impacted my outlook on informational sources tremendously.
Below you will find a copy of the meticulous analysis my group and I did of every single minute of music (or lack of music) in Lee Daniels’ The Butler that led us to this realization.
