"It's really tailored to the students' needs and not our needs," she says. Although there are large topics and specific repertoires to cover, "we also go day by day, as we read their papers and listen to their response."

Schmidt says the course, which has 10 students this semester, is "really interactive."

Though small, the class is made up of students with many different interests.

"We've had a wide spectrum of people," Goldberg says. "Jazz, electric guitarists, cabaret singers; we have people going to med school and people who plan to devote their lives to music."

Non-musicians can also take the class: "We're trying to build an awareness of how musical elements relate to one another [but] aren't dependent on particular technical names," Goldberg says. "I had a teacher once who actually called chord names by fruit names. We had to find out how blueberries related to strawberries."

He adds that his goal is to make students aware of the social context of music.

Aside from Western classical music, the syllabus also includes African drumming and Jewish folk songs, which "open more than one view-point, or hear-point," Goldberg says.

"People talk about music as a universal language... But there are many musics, as there are many languages," he says.

"When you're playing music, you necessarily connect with someone or something outside of yourself," he says. "I wish to start people investigating how music is taking place socially, politically, spiritually, not just how, for example, this pitch connects to this pitch."