New course presents Beethoven quartet for first time

While most courses benefit from the addition of speakers or performers in a Presidential Dream Course, one classes’ vitality is entirely based on it.

The dream course called Beethoven String Quartet will explore the history of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s string quartets, how those quartets fit into the history of string quartet repertoire and how Beethoven wrote them, associate professor of music theory Sarah Ellis said.

This will be the first time that Beethoven’s entire string quartet cycle will be played at OU, Ellis said.

Hearing the music live is integral to the class because there’s a lot one can’t get from music by hearing it on a CD or MP3, which aren’t the highest quality music files, Ellis said.

“There’s always an extra component to music when you hear it live,” Ellis said. “It really brings music to life to…hear the performance and see them breathing and working together.”

The quartet performances throughout the year are open to all students. Admission likely will cost the same as tickets for performances in the School of Music, but that is not yet determined, Ellis said.

Dream course professors are given a $20,000 endowment to bring speakers or performers to the university, Senior Vice President and Provost Nancy Mergler said.

Ellis and her colleagues that also teach the class were able to bring in four professional string quartets to play Beethoven’s quartets at OU through this endowment. In addition, OU’s faculty string quartet and honors undergraduate string quartet will be performing during the semester, she said.

Seven dream courses were approved for the spring semester, some of them include Managing Dilemmas: Political Economy, Technological Innovation, and Values; The Shakespeare Moot Court; Jerusalem: History of a Holy City/Contested City; and The Beethoven String Quartet, according to provided documents.

This course is entirely reliant on the performers that come in, unlike Expository Writing Professor Eric Bosse’s dream course which can function well without the addition of speakers to the curriculum, he said.

In his course called The Writing Life, students are primarily reading and writing about authors who wrote about the writing profession, he said.

The focus of the class is to understand what it’s meant, historically and presently, to live and work as a writer, according to the course description.

Bosse has taught the course once before and said it works well either way—with or without speakers. Speakers do complicate the course, but it’s a wonderful complication, he said.

That’s part of what makes the courses exciting though, Mergler said.

“The course probably becomes a bit more unpredictable, some of these speakers won’t necessarily stick to the syllabus topic,” Mergler said. “That is part of the fun.”

The addition of speakers humanizes the experience for the students in his class, Bosse said.

“Instead of talking about writers as if they’re some species that we might be able to visit at the zoo, we have them coming and talking to us,” he said.

In choosing speakers for the course, Bosse admittedly took the term ‘dream course’ literally.

“I just sort of started with my wildest dreams,” he said.

George Saunders and Emily Danforth are among the award-winning authors he’s arranged to speak at OU, according to an email. Tracy Smith, 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning poet, spoke Monday at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

Paighten Harkins

Send Paighten Harkins a message