Joined a Class, Left with a Band
Liz Wolfe's experience in MUS 11500: Performing Popular Music
There is a moment Liz Wolfe still remembers from the end-of-semester MUS 115 concert at Silvana in East Harlem. Her band started playing “Wonderwall,” and suddenly the room joined in. “There were so many supportive friends and family members cheering us on in the audience,” Wolfe remembers. “And when we played our song ‘Wonderwall’ everyone in the venue sang right along with us.”
Arms went up. Voices got louder. Wolfe looked out at the crowd and realized that what had begun months earlier as a City College class had, for a few minutes, turned into something else entirely. “It was a true ‘rock and roll concert’ moment,” she says, “completely unexpected and so heartwarming.”
That possibility is at the center of MUS 11500: Performing Popular Music, a rotating-topics course taught by Professor Matt Carter. Students don’t simply study popular music in MUS 115. They form bands, choose repertoire, rehearse together, arrange and reinterpret songs, compose original music, and eventually perform it in front of an audience. And sometimes the bands keep going after the semester ends.
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