This course is designed to give the student an overview of the sounds of music as they changed from ragtime through current popular trends. Students will be encouraged to participate actively in the class by listening and discussion sessions, and present reports on favorite artists. Even the most elementary history should impart to its students a notion of the limited scope of the time in which we live and a sense of the vast horizons that the knowledge of the past unrolls, that the world of today and of ourselves is only a link in the endless chain of ages, each of which has tried to create a supreme expression of its mind and its trend of its faith and its will.