Course Details

Course offered Winter 2014

Honors 398 A: Experiencing Music (A&H)

Honors 398 A: Experiencing Music (A&H)

SLN 20872 (View UW registration info »)

Ileana Marin (Comparative History of Ideas; Comparative Literature)
Phone: 206 604-1831
Email: marini@uw.edu
Claudia Jensen (Slavic Languages and Literatures)
Phone: 206-543-6848
Email: cjensen@uw.edu

Credits: 3, c/nc
Limit: 23 students

NOTE: This course does NOT fulfill Interdisciplinary Honors requirements for 2010 or later students. ALL INTERDISC HONORS REQUIREMENTS MUST BE MET WITH 5 CR CLASSES. It will only award non-Honors UW elective credit and a great experience.

For pre-2010 College Honors students, this course can fulfill your Honors Seminar requirement.

How do we experience live music? What have writers, philosophers, and artists said about its power? This experiential learning course will introduce students to the Winter 2014 season at the Seattle Symphony and to performances of contemporary music performed at the Icebreaker VII Festival. Students will complete readings and short writing assignments over the quarter, based on their attendance at a series of pre-selected concerts throughout the quarter. We will also engage with musicians and other artistic staff at Benaroya Hall for their insights into programming, performance, and other topics.

The concerts and dates are as follows (and note that students will be required to attend at least six of the seven scheduled concerts). Students will be asked to purchase tickets either through the Symphony’s Campus Club ($12 per concert; sign up at http://www.seattlesymphony.org/symphony/buy/campus.aspx) or through the Teen Tix program ($5 per concert; http://www.teentix.org/). We will collect funds on the first day of class and will purchase all tickets for the quarter. Feel free to contact Claudia Jensen (cjensen@uw.edu) if you have questions or concerns about paying for the tickets.

The list of concerts we plan to attend is as follows (and note that most are on Thursdays, but there one Friday concert and one Sunday concert; all concerts are at Benaroya Hall, except the Feb. 16 concert, which is at On The Boards, so plan accordingly):

Jan. 17 (Friday) Tchaikfest! (3rd Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto)
Jan. 23 (Thursday) Prokofiev, Haydn, Mozart
Jan. 30 (Thursday) J. Adams, Shostakovich
Feb. 13 (Thursday) Schumann, Berlioz
Feb. 16 (Sunday) Icebreaker VII Festival: Open Source (Seattle Chamber Players, at On the Boards)
March 6 (Thursday) Strauss (Richard, not Johann)
March 13 (Thursday) Dvořák, Bartók, Mozart

Please note that this is our planned list; if we need to make changes, we will give you as much notice as possible. There will be no final exam, although students will write a final short essay summarizing their experiences. All writing will be appropriate for the Honors portfolio.