Charting the Course

Jeffrey L. Goldberg '86, Dunster House music tutor and co-instructor of Dunster 119: "Discovering Musical Language," points to a sheet of music: "This is dead," he says. "It takes human beings to bring it to life."

His co-instructor, Luise Vosgerchian, Naumberg professor of music and former chair of the music department, says the class is not about getting the right answer.

"It's about feeling secure about your own intuition," she says. "So much of education seems to be about what is expected and memorized that it takes courage and risk [to make your own decisions.]"

"Trust your response," she adds. "Then the responsibility that comes in is: what made you have that response? What is there in the music that created that in you? Then you really begin to learn and get a handle of what's there."

"It doesn't make any difference that there are many different points of view as long as each point of view fits into the totality," Vosgerchian continues.

Goldberg, who was Vosgerchian's student when he was an undergraduate, echoes her sentiments.

"The word responsibility means `capable of response,'" he says, "and that means getting away from being a slave to the text."

Although the main focus of the course is listening to music, Goldberg says it also aims to help students bring out "What's there," to express through performance the evocative qualities that are inherent in the music.

Julia M. Schmidt '98, a soprano, says that "students are open to suggestions and are able to change their interpretation right there on the spot, so that the other students can compare the different versions."

Many of the students say they were drawn to the seminar because of the performance aspect.

"I'm also taking Music 51, which is intense theory stuff," says Jacob E. Fleming '01, who plays the clarinet. "I wanted something a little more performance-oriented."

But Dunster 119 is not a typical performance-only class because it focuses less on interpretation and more on "understanding the structure of a piece," says Sarita N. Cannon '98, another soprano.

The course is also unique because students are allowed to study music that they bring to class, resulting in a diverse syllabus.

"We had Thelonius Monk, we had Beethoven, we may have some Kurt Weil coming up," Goldberg says.

Vosgerchian says the students decide what the course is about as much as their teachers.

"It's really tailored to the students' needs and not our needs," she says. Although there are large topics and specific repertoires to cover, "we also go day by day, as we read their papers and listen to their response."

Schmidt says the course, which has 10 students this semester, is "really interactive."

Though small, the class is made up of students with many different interests.

"We've had a wide spectrum of people," Goldberg says. "Jazz, electric guitarists, cabaret singers; we have people going to med school and people who plan to devote their lives to music."

Non-musicians can also take the class: "We're trying to build an awareness of how musical elements relate to one another [but] aren't dependent on particular technical names," Goldberg says. "I had a teacher once who actually called chord names by fruit names. We had to find out how blueberries related to strawberries."

He adds that his goal is to make students aware of the social context of music.

Aside from Western classical music, the syllabus also includes African drumming and Jewish folk songs, which "open more than one view-point, or hear-point," Goldberg says.

"People talk about music as a universal language... But there are many musics, as there are many languages," he says.

"When you're playing music, you necessarily connect with someone or something outside of yourself," he says. "I wish to start people investigating how music is taking place socially, politically, spiritually, not just how, for example, this pitch connects to this pitch."