Contact:
Eric Sloss
412-268-5765

For immediate release:
May 4, 2006

Carnegie Mellon's School of Music Offers Online Listening Course

PITTSBURGH—Leonard Bernstein once said, "If you like music at all, you'll find out the meanings for yourselves, just by listening." This is the premise behind a four-semester course required for all Carnegie Mellon University music majors. "Repertoire & Listening for Musicians," created by School of Music faculty member Paul Johnston, is the first course in the school to be taught entirely online. "Since it's music-based, not lecture-based, it just made sense to do it that way," Johnston said.

"If you want to be a professional musician, practicing hard, receiving excellent instruction, and gaining ensemble experience are some of the ways you'll keep getting better," Johnston tells his students. "But you can reach much higher if you hear how high others have taken our art."

This class exposes music students — and the occasional non-major — to many of the best practitioners of their art. "And even if you don't have a music career in mind, there's value in just marinating in excellence — in having lived a life which includes that once-in-a-species composer Mozart and the intensity of conductor Arturo Toscanini," Johnston said.

Online, students can listen to the weekly music selections from any location with an Internet connection. They then respond to questions Johnston posts on Blackboard, a popular Carnegie Mellon Web site designed to manage coursework. Each week, students are expected to listen critically to two to three hours of streamed audio, respond to Johnston's discussion starters, and continue conversation with their classmates through the discussion board in Blackboard. In the second semester, Johnston adds score reading to the listening and writing components of the class.

Students can also post to an online café, where they alert classmates to concerts (including their own), upcoming appearances by musical groups and notable soundtracks they may have heard at a movie.

The School of Music is one of the nation's most distinguished degree-granting music conservatory programs. It is one of five schools within Carnegie Mellon's College of Fine Arts, a community of nationally and internationally recognized artists and professionals organized into Architecture, Art, Design, Drama, and Music, as well as their associated centers and programs.

For more information on the School of Music or the College of Fine Arts, visit www.cmu.edu/cfa or contact Eric Sloss at 412-268-5765 or ecs@andrew.cmu.edu.