Professor Lobley is a GREAT professor and he always provides a lot of different material and brings in a lot of guest speakers that have different perspectives on music. You get a lot of participation in this class through answering top hat questions each week. However, my TA was Stephanie Gunst was my TA and basically graded all of the assignments for this class: a critical review of a song, a blog entry, and my final project paper - all had to be at least 2000 words. The assignments were interesting, but Stephanie graded them very critically. Only take this class if your TA is good.

I absolutely loved this course! Professor Lobely was an absolute joy and he is just so enthusiastic about his subject. I would definitely take a course with him again if offered. The course consists of readings and papers. The lectures are fun, with music videos and lots of pictures. Professor Lobely also encourages participation in the lecture. He is also very helpful with recommendations on how you can improve your writings. Best course at UVa if you ask me. I got an A+

This class was really enjoyable and not very stressful. Your entire grade consists of 4 papers of different lengths and a grade from your discussion section. If you have any opinion on any kind of music the papers are generally really easy and very fun to write, you don't even really need to do the readings besides the for the final paper. Noel is an awesome guy, he genuinely wants you to do well in the class so if you go to him with questions about papers he'll be very helpful. With that said, I had class at 9AM and skipped quite a bit but still got an A, so take that as you wish. Overall, fun and minimally stressful class, definitely worth taking!