Why I Failed to Appreciate Music Appreciation

This essay has nothing to do with politics or religion, but rather it is something I decided to write in order to settle the matter once and for all.

Music Appreciation is the only class I took in college in which I saw no real value, not because I don't appreciate music, but rather the class went about teaching music in exactly the wrong way.

The class was too much stop-and-go. We would listen to pieces of classical music, being asked to experience some part of it--which is easy for me to do, because I like classical music--and then the teacher would press pause during or right before it was getting really good. More than even the greatest suspense novels or psychological thrillers, music depends upon the build-up.

Let me put this heinous crime in perspective. Imagine that one was listening to Opeth's "Dirge For November", or "Porcelain Heart", or even "To Bid You Farewell", and stopped immediately before the great crescendos in order to do something else for five minutes. That's like riding a roller coaster and having it stall right at the peak, immediately forfeiting all of the anticipation and tenseness that it took to get there.

No, you cannot regain the same involvement you had while you were listening before it was paused, because by the time the teacher was done talking, he had erased any recollection of what it was you were listening to in the first place. And worse--even worse--is that sometimes the teacher would have played a piece of music to demonstrate something, stop it right as we were getting into it, and then and move on to something else.

Not only that, but often we were listening in order to find some obscure instrument that, given the dismal audio system in the room, was drowned amongst the crowded symphony. Our full attention was paid to finding a few notes at the exclusion of everything else that was going on in the piece: We were listening to pieces of music and being told not to appreciate them in the fullest.

Furthermore, there was zero room for interpretation. Never did we listen to a piece in full and were asked to interpret it. There was hardly any writing beyond the notes we took and short answers on tests. In literature, by contrast, I may take a poem apart and investigate each line and word choice, and its style and rhythm, but the goal is always to put it back together again for interpretation. This never happened in Music Appreciation.

The class, when it comes to actually appreciating music, had entirely failed. I didn't care about the instruments in the class because I wasn't given a chance to adequately experience them.

The emphasis was upon memorization of the instruments and their functions, not the music itself. In fact, if it weren't for my affinity for classical music didn't exist before the class, I'm quite sure I wouldn't care for it afterward.

It was a class one would have expected to experience in high school, exploring a creative enterprise without any creative thinking on the part of the students themselves.

I hated Music Appreciation precisely because I appreciate music.

Dirge For November: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ipUGylvmo

Porcelain Heart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CES-rze2m1s

To Bid You Farewell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2frjwvDQg5I