As students file into a Christopher Newport University classroom on a cold Friday morning just before 9 a.m., Taylor Swift greets them: “All I can say it was enchanting to meet you.”
Gentle acoustic guitars give way to a more dynamic sound in Swift’s “Enchanted,” background music for the students. Once class starts, the Swift music doesn’t stop, though the mood changes from casual listening to analysis.
Is “This Love” legato or staccato? Same question for “Shake It Off”? From there the discussion led by professor Chelsey Hamm shifts to adagio, vivace, tempi and corpus.
Welcome to “Conceptualizing Taylor Swift,” an honors seminar that engages students by applying music theory to the most-streamed artist on Spotify and Apple Music, a four-time Grammy Award winner whose two-year Eras Tour grossed an estimated $2.2 billion, according to the New York Times. That’s nearly double the second highest-grossing tour, Beyoncé’s Renaissance.
“My best friend dragged me to the Eras Tour, and I loved it,” said Paige Kelly, a freshman musical theater major at CNU. “I thought this class would be more like an English course where we would just analyze lyrics but it’s a music class. I love this. This is my happy.”
CNU joins Harvard, University of Texas, Stanford, American, Rice, New York University and dozens more using the Swift phenomenon to explore music theory, business, economics, gender studies and other topics.
Student interest drove Hamm to take the necessary steps to get the Swift honors class faculty approved.
“One of the things I do before all my classes is get student requests for songs,” Hamm said. “The last three years I’ve gotten a lot of requests for Swift. Last year I had a senior do her capstone project on her.
More Beyoncé fan than Swiftie, Hamm hasn’t taught a course built around one artist before, though she took a seminar on composer Charles Ives while earning a doctorate in music theory from Indiana University. She fosters discussion with group work and pulls up Swift songs on YouTube for fresh examples.
Hamm is impressed by Swift for several reasons.
“She has an exceptional number of Billboard hits and she’s exceptionally productive,” she said. “She puts out a lot of new music quickly. And one of the things that sets her apart is her consistency. She’s been doing this for 15 years.”
Twenty-two college-aged women are in the class along with four men, including 81-year-old Douglas Chessen, a psychiatrist in CNU’s Office of Counseling Services. Though more a Bob Dylan listener himself, he is auditing the class because “My daughter, granddaughter, daughter-in-law and sister-in-law all love Taylor. I’m trying to find out what the frenzy is about,” Chessen said.
Chessen can’t rattle off Swift titles like his classmates, whose recall of songs leads to connections, such as offering up “Dear John” as an example of pure legato.
“These kids know all these songs; sometimes I feel like I’m lost,” he said.
The course, with thrice weekly reading assignments, covers music terminology like secondary parameters, mode, melody and rhythm before moving into form, texture, instrumentation and drumbeats. It culminates with a 10- to 12-page music analysis paper with the student selecting the precise topic.
Sophomores Ella Booher, a communications major, and Luke Eaddy, working toward a computer engineering degree, enjoy the pace of the class. Booher is an unabashed Swiftie, and “he’s good to me,” she said pointing to Eaddy.
“We have a habit of taking honors classes together,” Eaddy said. “But I’d say this is a pretty interesting topic. I mean, she became a billionaire writing pop music.”
Booher regards attending the Eras Tour in Philadelphia as the greatest experience in her life, adding, “This is definitely a class worth waking up before 9 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for.”
