Traditional music appreciation classes begin with an overview of musical elements—melody, instruments, etc.—and proceed with a chronological survey of great Western musical works. I have identified several issues with this approach, and I offer a thematic syllabus that I have found to be engaging, educational, and popular with my students. The insights I share in this essay stemmed from my nine and a half years of experience teaching 1,000+ students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Here are some issues I have encountered when using a traditional approach to teaching music appreciation:

• Lack of connection between musical elements and early music: Students start the semester learning about major versus minor tonality, orchestra versus chamber music, etc., only to be told that in the Medieval era few of these concepts apply.
• Connecting the unfamiliar with the unfamiliar: Telling students that Baroque music is like Baroque art or Baroque literature is like telling someone that an apple is like an orange when the person has never heard of fruit. It is difficult to make connections between two unfamiliar items.
• Lack of popular references: It is often difficult to connect much of the material with pop music.
• Beginning with unpopular music: Most students have an easier time connecting with the expressive Romantic era and the colorful Modern era than with Medieval and Renaissance music, which is the first music they encounter in a chronological approach. As such, the semester can begin in an unengaging, alienating fashion.
• Overemphasis on historicity: By organizing the music chronologically, the traditional approach puts more emphasis on the historical context of the music than on the content and meaning of the music itself.¹I can see how professors who want to use music as a gateway to historical insights may prefer a chronological approach.

My thematic approach begins in the traditional fashion with an overview of musical elements. From there, I take the great musical works found in music appreciation courses and organize them by thematic content, each theme taking a few days to a week to cover in a 14-week semester.²I believe that this approach works for non-musical topics as well. For example, on the radio show This American Life, each episode tells stories based on a theme. Another example is the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where each wall of the 19th Century Painters gallery features a topic such as “children,” “green,” “rural life,” etc. The main themes that I use are:

• church music
• love in music
• death in music
• nature in music, and
• the supernatural in music.

For example, in “love in music” I teach Arcadelt’s “Il bianco e dolce cigno,” Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, and Whitney Houston's “I Will Always Love You.” Each selection focuses on love from a different perspective. I focus on the content of the music, show how the composers use musical devices to bring this content to life, make connections across eras, and weave pop music into the conversation, all while enhancing students’ understanding of love through music and music through love.

I intersperse the semester with weeks entitled “Bach and the Baroque Era,” “Mozart and the Classical Era,” and “Beethoven, Brahms, and Romanticism,” and I conclude the course with three weeks on the Modern era, including a week on film and crossover music. Doing so enables students to have a historical framework alongside the thematic approach, while also emphasizing the most renowned composers. Some of the benefits of this thematic approach include:

• Relevance: Students understand the concepts of love, death, nature, etc., so they can take their own insights and connect with the music rather than feel that the music is irrelevant to them.
• Connections across eras: This approach shows similarities and differences across musical eras.
• Pop culture references: This approach allows for pop music at any point in the semester.
• Revisiting works: I teach George Crumb’s Voice of the Whale during nature week and then revisit it during the Modern era. Repeated exposures in different contexts give the students a deeper and more memorable experience with the music.
• History included: As described above, students still learn about composers and musical eras in chronological order.
• Flexibility: It is easy to alter the syllabus between textbooks and semesters.

The proof is in the pudding: out of 1,049 students who took the end-of-semester survey that I have given my students over the years, 89% affirmed that “the themes made the material more interesting than it would have been otherwise.”

Music appreciation is an important, and in my opinion, underrated class. It gives professors an opportunity to excite people about some of the greatest music ever written when those people may never gain exposure to it otherwise. It is musical missionary work. If I can excite one student each semester, then I have done my job, and my impression is that this thematic approach enables me to achieve that goal.

Notes

^[1] I can see how professors who want to use music as a gateway to historical insights may prefer a chronological approach.

^[2] I believe that this approach works for non-musical topics as well. For example, on the radio show This American Life, each episode tells stories based on a theme. Another example is the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where each wall of the 19^th Century Painters gallery features a topic such as “children,” “green,” “rural life,” etc.