ABSTRACT
As people gain more experience with teaching non-majors people will eventually find that it is indeed possible to bring them to an adequate understanding of genre, form, style, and performance practice. But people must set those particular priorities aside at first in favor of establishing a common ground with and among our students, through mutual exploration of music as an idea rather than as a sounding phenomenon. Choose the music love most when people teach non-majors; then it will be most convincing when people do so. Remember, the specific paths, signposts, and destinations are not important; in the liberal arts classroom, it's the journey that counts. Form and structure are often difficult to teach, even to music majors. But non-majors are often unaware that form even exists as an important element of music, and they will typically have given little thought to the structure of their own favorite music.
