The core of Auburn's music studies is expanding beyond the basic appreciation of music.
The history of popular music, offered in the summer and science and music, offered in the fall, will be offered as core fine arts credit classes for College of Liberal Arts majors starting in the 2014 summer semester.
"We just wanted to give the student body more options to complete their fine arts course," said Sarah Collins, administrative assistant with the department of music. "Right now, the department of music only has music appreciation as our only contribution to the fine arts core. If students really enjoy these courses, we might think of some new ones later on."
Starting in the 2014 summer semester, the history of popular music, taught by Howard Goldstein, offers an alternative introduction to understanding music.
According to Goldstein, rather than beginning with the birth of western music during the middle ages, this class will start shortly before the start of the twentieth century.
"We'll start somewhere at the end of the 19th century with the composers of Tin Pan Alley, Ragtime and Blues," Goldstein said. "From there we progress through the 20th century to jazz, rock, big band, tango music, world music, anything considered to be of a popular origin."
In the School of Music's bulletin the history of popular music is listed as not counting for core credit hours, a false statement students should disregard when applying.
The class is indeed worth the standard core fine arts credit hours.
While Goldstein's class centers on the history of contemporary music, science and music, taught by Ann Knipschild, will study music's relationship to mathematics, physics, biology and human behavior.
Rather than analyzing the music itself, science and music
Knipschild said she found inspiration for the class's curriculum while listening to a radio broadcast of Daniel Levitin's book "This Is Your Brain On Drugs."
"How do we perceive music, how do we react to music, why do we like certain types of music; these are some of the things that we'll be talking about as a class," Knipschild said. "Back in the time of Pythagoras around 800 b.c. music was considered a science. We're going to start there and talk about the origins of music, how music relates to the different sciences, instrument construction, acoustics and more."
Music and science will be offered for the 2014 fall semester.
Knipschild said these kind of classes are perfect examples of the type of curriculum expansion that her and Goldstein have been trying to implement.
While courses in jazz history and American music are available this fall as directed studies for music majors only, these two new classes will be offered to all levels as core classes without prerequisites.
Because of faculty constraints, classes are usually introduced as directed studies before they are added into the curriculum.
"If the only fine arts departments on campus are music, theater and art, it really doesn't make sense that we only have one of these options," Collins said. "There's so many different options that we could have."
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