Review:
Dr. Neff is one of the best professors I have ever had. She has an insurmountable amount of enthusiasm for teaching as well as the subject matter and is an endless well of musical knowledge. She is very challenging for any level musician and definitely pushes her students and has high expectations, but she is also very encouraging.

She wants all her students to succeed and although she is very busy, always makes herself very available through extra help sessions as well as E-mail.

She sometimes struggled to get the class involved but was always willing and able to answer questions and very involved when students did participate. Although we never really had alternative views ourselves, Dr. Neff always presented differing theories about various events in Beethoven's life or piece of music. I'm sure Dr. Neff would welcome the idea of a lively discussion filled with differing viewpoints, it was not really possible in an introductory music class about a subject nearly all of us were studying for the first time.

I learned an amazing amount of information about Beethoven's music, his life, the history of his time, and the music of his time. I would definitely say the amount of knowledge you take away from this course depends on your interest in knowing it and the effort you put into learning it.

Although I planned on taking only one music class, I will definitely take another one so I can take a class with Dr. Neff again.

Workload:
Don't take this class if you are not interested in learning about music or just want an easy A. Dr. Neff is a very fair grader but it's pretty obvious because of the way the tests/papers are designed if you don't know what you're doing.

The workload was average for a Tufts course. We had three tests (which got progressively more challenging but never unreasonable) and two papers. I never read the book and you don't need to, but I don't know how much I missed by not reading it. I found it easier and more entertaining if I did my listening while following the written music. An ability to read music is definitely not necessary for this course, but it did help me out.

The assignments were very straightforward but challenging. For me the papers required a lot of thought before I could begin writing. Procrastination on the listening is a very bad idea; it will come back to bite you in the ass because you have to be able to recognize them by ear on the tests. It is a lot easier if you have listened to all the pieces repeatedly and it is impossible to do that if you wait until the last minute.

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