In my field, at least, teaching at Berkeley has three tiers: the introductory level for lower-division non-majors, the more specialized level for upper-division majors, and the graduate level. My philosophy, or my goals, shift from level to level.

I suspect that teaching music on the introductory level is unlike anything else in the university. The students come in illiterate. Not only do most of them not know the language or how to read, they do not know the alphabet, either by sight or sound. My task is to shake the students out of the habit of treating music as a warm sound bath, a sort of aural jacuzzi. I want to awaken their interest in music as a kind of nonverbal discourse, and to stimulate them to pay attention to that discourse, to recognize listening to music as a kind of cognitive activity.

My method is to avoid as much as possible musical notation and the common reliance of our culture on the eyes and on visual signals. Instead I try to bring the ears into action and to awaken the capacities for following basic musical thought processes. I think of the enterprise as analogous to teaching how to taste wine: it is bringing into action a perceptual mechanism to which our culture pays little educational attention, and for which a vocabulary is scarcely developed in normal childhood.

On the second level, the level of the upper-division undergraduate, my aim is to begin to teach the student to reflect on the artwork historically and critically. This means teaching the student to think clearly and accurately about music and to communicate these thoughts efficiently and even elegantly to others. Here the ability to make verbal formulations—to write and speak—becomes essential. In my lectures I try to offer models of ways in which one can discuss and communicate one's impression that music has meaning.

At no level—least of all at the level of graduate education—do I think of my primary mission as the conveying of information that can as easily be read in books, presented on tapes, or called up from databases. I am always aiming to teach how to do something, to teach a mode of action. On the level of graduate seminars and the advising of dissertations, the formulations of the questions themselves and of appropriate methods for answering them become the principal focus of attention for student and teacher alike.

At all three levels, the activity of teaching seems to me particularly blessed, for it allows me to spend my time with what I love and gives a oneness to my life that students value—in the literal sense, appreciate. One might say that my business is my hobby—or that I have no hobbies. I am always working—or never working. Whatever the formulation, the result is a rare wholeness to one's intellectual, even one's physical, life. I talk passionately in the classroom about the things that I talk about with equal passion outside the classroom; I think in the evening and on the weekend about the things I think about during the weekday. Retirement is not an issue, since I would go on doing what I do even if it were no longer my job. I do what I do because I love what I work with. Even the sanguine among us will admit that such a privileged situation is rare, that teaching—as opposed to, say, football playing—allows one to grow in it to old age, and even to be rejuvenated by it.