ABSTRACT
Responding to student interest by adding the Beatles into a music department’s curriculum served as an opportunity both to engage students with the core curricular goals of a four-year liberal arts undergraduate college and to experiment with classroom pedagogy. A seminar compared Beatles biographies and analyses of their music (and led to the campus’s most popular annual concert on which students can explore new interpretations of the music). An introductory lecture course on the topic led to an online version of the class accessible not only to students, but also parents and alumni. At each stage, student interest in the Beatles contributed to greater student engagement. As an ethnomusicologist interested in what music can tell us about culture, I learned that introducing the Beatles into the classroom helped make our music curriculum more relevant to our students.
