Hard College Courses

I just ran across this fascinating description of a hard college course:

In the fall of 1941, as a visiting faculty member at the University of Michigan, the poet W.H. Auden offered an undergraduate course of staggering intellectual scope, entitled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature.” We know little about the origins or trajectory of this remarkable course: how it was conceived, how it was taught, how it was received.

Seventy-one years after the course was taught, a faded, marked-up copy of Auden’s original one-page syllabus was unearthed in Michigan’s archives by the literary scholar Alan Jacobs. He then posted on the internet for all to see. Soon it was circulating widely, eliciting a surprising amount of commentary.

The course was enormous. It was as if Auden had put together an idiosyncratic and mainly literary version of a Great Books curriculum and compressed it into a single semester.

Beginning with the ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, the course covered the Roman poet Horace, then St. Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, a bouquet of Shakespeare plays, Pascal, Racine, Blake, Goethe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, Eliot, and other certifiable greats, tossed in some then-classic scholarship about culture (including Ruth Benedict and C.S. Lewis), then washed it all down with the bubbly delights of nine opera libretti.

All in a single semester. Who could digest such a feast?

Sounds like a great course. But something like this would never appear in a college curriculum today, right? I'm not so sure. Let me describe a course I took when I was taking doctoral seminars in musicology at McGill. One was on the Shostakovich symphonies. This was in the 90s and scholarship on Shostakovich was still at an early stage. There were articles in the Musical Times covering the UK premieres of the symphonies but other than that, almost no secondary literature. If you look at the literature on Shostakovich, most of it dates from the last twenty years, not earlier. So the first thing we had to learn (and were quizzed on) was the Cyrillic alphabet because the edition of the complete works of Shostakovich in the library was a Soviet edition all in Russian. You had to know Cyrillic just to find the volume with the symphonies. Here you go:

My favorite letter is the "z", the one that looks like a squashed bug. Ok, so alphabet learned, each week we had to present a symphony in the seminar based on our original research. There are fifteen symphonies and about the same number of students in the class so we did one each. I had the Symphony No. 2. We had to find the score, listen to the symphony with the score and dig out any articles published on the symphony. There was a scarcity of musicological literature on Shostakovich at that time, the most interesting of which was by Richard Taruskin, a Russian specialist. He had written a paper a few years earlier, in 1991, titled "Public lies and unspeakable truth: interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony" (given at  a conference at Ohio State University in October 1991 and published in Shostakovich Studies CUP 1995).

Some preparatory assignments were to read that Taruskin paper and listen to the immediate symphonic predecessors: Mahler, Sibelius, Beethoven (Symphony No. 9) and so on. We were marked on our presentations, of course, but the main mark was based on a rarity in graduate school: a final exam. The professor argued that as we were mostly studying the symphonies directly and not secondary sources, we should strive to be as familiar with them as possible. So the final exam would be a listening test! He would play brief excerpts from the symphonies, fifteen of them, a total of around sixty movements, and we had to identify the symphony and movement. In order to do this we had to listen to the symphonies many, many times. We had to become familiar with all the themes from all the movements. Each movement might contain two, three or more contrasting themes. These are not short movements! One of the most famous, the Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad" is about an hour and twenty minutes in length. The first movement is almost half an hour! I can remember thinking to myself that "this could be very easy, or it could be very hard" depending on what excerpts he chose. He went on to add that we might be expected to identify the context of the theme: was it in the exposition or recapitulation? Agh! I got together with another student in the class and we managed to thoroughly depress one another. We were both pretty good students and were able to pick sections so sneakily that we could stump the other quite regularly. When we got to the actual exam we found that he had picked very obvious examples and were able to ace the test. That reminded me of a listening test in undergrad at the end of a course on 20th century music. That one had me worried a lot until the first example, the beginning of the Lyric Suite by Berg. Easy example!

But make no mistake, doing enough active and analytical listening to be able to walk into one of these listening tests with some confidence is not easy. Why don't you give it a try? Listen to all the Shostakovich symphonies enough to be able to identify all the themes from all the movements. I will wait right here...

A couple of envois for you. First, the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich:

Next, the Lyric Suite by Berg:

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the source of the quote. I also forgot to mention that three professors at the University of Oklahoma took up the challenge and recreated a version of the original Auden course. Every time they have offered it more and more students have clamored to take the course. Must be their irresistible advertising slogan: "This is the hardest course you will ever take!"