Many undergraduate music appreciation courses survey the history of music from the Baroque to the 20th century by covering a combination of information about composers and a study of musical forms and genres. This format has much to commend it. However, in one semester it is very difficult to do justice to the breadth of material that should be covered. An alternative involves taking a different view of how a student can best be presented with the major ideas in the history of western art music.

The Music and Society course was designed to view this evolution through the eyes of six representative composers: Machaut, Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, and Prokofiev. Obviously, the point was not to select the most important composers in the time frame but, rather, to find those whose careers demonstrated typical ways in which composers interacted with society and found ways of expressing their art. The course began with a general introduction to musical terms and concepts, followed by units on each of the composers.

The course was taught to a class of approximately twenty students in a traditional residential college setting. However, new technology was employed to enrich the experience. The first step was the creation of a class home page containing all the class study materials. The composer study units contained a variety of materials to augment the information covered in class lectures and discussions. Some examples follow.

A few significant readings were selected for each composer. It did not seem appropriate to create an excessively long list of links, since it was more realistic to expect students to read on two or three specific essays. Examples include:

Outstanding examples of students’ writing were also included when the instructor believed that their work would benefit students in future semester. An example was:

In an effort to create review sessions to prepare students for tests, multiple-choice JavaScript quizzes were created that graded student responses immediately upon submission. These grades were not submitted to the professor but used by the students for study purposes only.

Examples can be seen at:

One of the difficulties faced by the general student in studying music history is learning the correct pronunciation of foreign terms, titles, and composers. In order to provide the information online, the professor created a dictionary enhanced with sound files made by native speakers from the foreign language department. In the Verdi unit, for example, students have access to sounds files of pronunciations related to opera. These are available at:

Students often need help with understanding the political and historical situations in which composers worked. With the help of Centennia software and Adobe Photoshop, the professor created maps to illustrate the exact place in which the composers worked. These helped to tie the material in music class to other classes in history and politics.

In a survey course of music history, students encounter a number of unfamiliar terms and concepts. Online animations convey new ideas in an engaging and effective way. Macromedia’s Flash 4 was used to create animations to illustrate material covered in the readings and lectures. These animations were included in the composer study guides. Their use was especially helpful to students with limited backgrounds in music.

This class format was made possible by a situation in which the professor created the materials and posted them on the web server. All students had easy, immediate access to the Internet. However, students were still operating in a completely traditional classroom setting in a largely residential college. It is difficult to know how radically the field of education will change in the immediate future with "distance education" figuring so prominently in discussions everywhere. The Music and Society class is an example of how a traditional class can take advantage of the new capabilities. It has served as a first step toward building a new concept of what is mainstream and traditional.