ARHU158U

Restricted to first semester first year students in the College of Arts and Humanities. A culture centered around playing music by long-dead European men. Elite trappings, sexist power dynamics, and gatekeeping that excludes people of color-- not to mention a concert scene devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. With all these problems, can classical music in the United States be fixed? This course asks students to examine, and attempt to solve, the troubles that have beset classical music today. It will also show why the genre has nevertheless endured: the deep value that musicians continue to find in compositions that are hundreds of years old, and the power that music can still carry in the twenty-first century.