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The course is designed to provide an overview of our musical culture, with an emphasis on concert music from about 1600 to the present. It examines the materials of instrumental and vocal music, and the history of the classical music tradition.

This course surveys various forms of music that are indigenous to the music culture of Chicago, such as jazz, blues, gypsy, Irish, and klezmer music. By combining interviews, recordings, films, and performance, this course connects the student with the neighborhoods and culture that brought these forms of music to Chicago. This course is presented in a five-week format (along with others during each academic term), to provide more flexible course schedule options. Each quarter, students can take one or two intensive Saturday courses that meet for six hours, in addition to the regularly scheduled weeknight courses. This course, MUS HIST 335-CN, meets for five Saturdays from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm: 2/20, 2/27, 3/6, 3/13, and 3/20. In this format, there is no class meeting on Saturday, February 13. Registration for MUS HIST 335-CN is open through February 5; late registration for this course begins February 6.

This course examines the history of rock 'n' roll as both a musical and cultural form. It explores rock's origins; the music's birth in the 1950s; its development in the 1960s; and its elaborations from the 1970s to the present. As the course proceeds, close attention is paid to crucial themes such as rock's economic underpinnings; its strange mutations as a genre; its racial, gender, and class dimensions; its relationship to youth culture; the stories of particular songs; the careers of exemplary performers; the question of rock's reception among various audiences; the politics of rock music; and what rock music reveals about the history of American - and even global - society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through multimedia lectures, class discussion, listening assignments, viewing assignments, online listening journals, a midterm, and a final exam, students pursue a deeper, more nuanced appreciation of rock 'n' roll music and its historical context. Formal musical training is not required for this course, but students work with basic musical concepts such as song structure and instrumentation.