Hi, I am Ryan, your teacher for this course. Welcome to Music Appreciation.
This course is a study of Western music from the Middle Ages to the present day. You will learn some of the terms we use to talk about music and what they mean, a little about music notation, and survey the major Western musical styles throughout history.
This class will require that you be able to listen to music online. To use the player in this course you will need to have Adobe Flash installed in your browser. Since Flash is a cross-platform environment, it will run in a variety of browsers on both Macs and PCs. You can go to the Adobe Flash Download center here to download the version of Flash for your system. The download is small, and Flash is quick to install, so you are unlikely to have any problems; if you do have problems please contact tech support through your student desk.
This is a one credit course. There is no half credit option. To receive credit you must complete all 20 lessons. Please do the lessons one at a time and in order. Each lesson builds upon the next, so please don't begin a new lesson until you have completed all previous lessons. Only move on to the next lesson when a lesson has been graded.
The final lesson in this course is a project where you will be writing your own lesson. This will give the opportunity to use everything you've learned in the course in analyzing modern music. Please don't start this project ahead of time, as it will take you time to understand the types of things you are looking for by going through the course, and you will need to correctly cite all your sources (and it won't do you any good if you find a great source now that isn't still available when you go to submit your project--you must be able to cite available sources at the time you submit.) I'm telling you about the project now so you are sure to leave yourself plenty of time at the end of the course to complete it.
If you need help, ask for help. Be specific with your questions and what you don't understand. I will try a little harder to explain myself. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me using the form at the bottom of the page.
The background image used in this course is the beginning of the Prelude from the Suite for Lute in G minor, handwritten musical notation by J.S. Bach.