Classical Music across the Curriculum By Jayne Karsten

Master Teacher Jayne Karsten shares ideas for using classical music to enhance teaching and learning in your classroom.

Jayne Karsten combines her experience as a dancer with her passion for the written word in teaching English, History, and Dance Theory to students at The Key School in Annapolis, Maryland. Karsten ardently believes in the power of arts integration, and tries to weave elements of all three disciplines into every class she teaches. Below, she shares ideas for using classical music to enhance teaching and learning in your classroom.

Study music as a reflection and agent of change.

In her history classes, Karsten tells students about artistic movements that sprang up at critical junctures in the past. “When you integrate the visual and performing arts,” she says, “it helps you illuminate and reinforce the dynamics of change in history. It lets you dramatize the fact that many historical events grew out of philosophical, social, and political change.”

“Classical music can be critical to this goal,” Karsten continues. “Not only does it often embody an established cultural outlook within a time period, but frequently it heralds change.” To help students link classical music to history to literature, Karsten encourages them to examine “historical cross-sections of artistic expression.” She urges them to seek out themes or aesthetic expressions that may be common to the music, literature, visual arts, and architecture of a particular time.

Explore how music illuminates a narrative.

To explore connections between literary works and music, Karsten first asks students to consider a modern analogue: TV shows and movies. Students view clips of Alfred Hitchcock films or other selected films, then tackle a batch of challenging questions: How does the music establish a sense of place? Can it help clarify the consciousness of a given character? In what ways does the music signal a shift in setting, theme, or tone? How does instrumentation or melody create a sense of foreboding or suspense?

Teacher and class then dive together into a literary work: Don Quixote, perhaps, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or works by Shakespeare or Chekhov. In a challenging exercise in synthesis and analysis, students are asked to find a classical music piece that would match a subplot or structural pattern of their assigned text. If the text jumps from a lyrical passage to an action sequence, for example, students might choose music that shifts quickly from a slow tempo to a fast one. If the text features a recurring motif, students could select a piece of music that contains a recurring melody.

Use music to foster personal connections to learning.

“I’m a great believer in inductive reasoning,” says Karsten. “I give students suggestions about how to make the match {between music and text passage}, but I don’t impose my ideas on them. It’s a process of personal discovery.”

Students don’t need to know music theory to enjoy the unit. Indeed, much of their enthusiasm stems from the latitude they enjoy in picking the music. “Giving students the opportunity to be their own person in finding a match for the emotional context of a scene or character,” says Karsten, “gives them ownership of this voyage of discovery. Their musical background is not that germane because music is intrinsic to the human spirit.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jayne Karsten teaches at The Key School in Annapolis, Maryland. She has served as an administrator for the National Endowment for the Humanities, a consultant on curriculum development for the National Archives, and a member of the Alfred P. Sloan National Committee on Writing.