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Jun 14, 2025
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2025-2026 Undergraduate Catalog
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ID 345 Music, Art & Memory
This course examines the nature of memory and its role in forming our individual identities, focusing particularly on the role of visual art and music in making, retaining and retrieving memories of elders. The central project of this course involves each student partnering with an elder in the beginning stages of memory loss at a local long-term care center. Through weekly visits including conversation, collaborative artwork, and musical exploration, students help elders exercise their creativity in a variety of arts, providing friendship and one-on-one, caring attention. As the elders’ memories surface in this process, they externalize them in artwork that they can hold on to, helping them to retain these memories. Meanwhile, the students and their partners build a cross-generational, and often cross-cultural, friendship based on mutual respect and caring. Each student creates a personalized collection of music for their partner. Students also create visual projects that interpret some of their partner’s memories. Students share these projects in a public, end-of-semester presentation before giving them to their elder partners. In addition to this final project, students write weekly reflective journal entries, lead classroom discussions and write a longer final reflection paper.
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