Classes begin in January 2025

Attending to music and art is difficult for modern people. Our distracted age pushes us to invest as little time as possible into every endeavour. As a result, we are well-practiced in the art of flitting about from thing to thing.
In this course, we will attend. We will listen to great music and view great pieces of art from the tradition. We will ask questions and make observations about the pieces, but more importantly we will spend time with the pieces. We will let the pieces work on us, shaping us into the kind of great men and women that have loved these pieces across the centuries. But even more importantly, we will learn to attend, and become more like people who can attend.

The content of the course is fourteen great pieces—seven musical and seven artistic. In class, we will spend time listening, viewing, and discussing the pieces. During the week, students will continue to listen and see the pieces themselves for about an hour. Four written responses will be submitted during the semester, but the focus will be on the students receiving the pieces, not having something clever to say about them.