Stop. Do not take this class. This course is a perfect horror story plagued by an overconfident, underqualified, vengeful, tenured professor who knows no god or authority. The content is interesting if you’re into that kind of stuff, but that’s all in terms of pros. Cheryl Keyes is WILDLY incompetent—immensely unqualified and unprofessional. Lectures are a lackadaisical series of useless, banal tangents. She follows no course structure and doesn’t employ lecture slides, so she simply forgets to cover content featured on the exams. She‘ll tell you that names are not too important, but HEED ME NOW; the midterm and final (together worth ~55% of your final grade) are comprised of perhaps 80% names. If it’s raining, there’s a heavy chance she‘ll not attend her own lecture (with no communication to students); I suspect she is water soluble, much like the wicked witch of the west. Don’t concern yourself with punctuality—she was far more often than not late to lecture and often didn’t get “rolling” (get it) until 15-20 minutes after the scheduled start time. The syllabus is for shits and giggles—she changed the date of the final, the final essay, the weighting of the grade subsections, and the required readings with little notice and incomplete communication. On the topic of communication, she does not respond to emails and is iffy about raised hands in lecture; if you want information out of her it is easier to accost her and shake it out of her one on one. So. The first midterm was tricky, the TAs grade it, and the average is around 75%. She is not satisfied with this, so she revoked the grades and scored them herself; the average dropped to a 69% or so. For the whole quarter she said “the final should be open notes”. Now, clever as I am, I didn’t believe a word of it. Some of my less fortunate classmates were rather caught off guard when this statement was revoked in week 10. Her justification? She suspected widespread cheating on the midterm. The very same midterm that had a D average. So, either WITH CHEATING, the best people could do was a D, she was being paranoid, or she was fibbing in our faces. Classic lose-lose-lose situation. Anywho, she popped into discussion on professor evaluation day (YIPE!) and when folks raised concerns over the final being closed-notes, she whipped out a GNARSTY attitude. Formerly, I had painted her as well-intentioned—just aggressively inept. However, she established herself as a board-certified opp in that discussion. It became evident that she wishes people to do poorly in her class because she did poorly in her undergrad. However, because—somehow—UCLA became her stomping grounds, the only way she can achieve this sick dynamic with such a qualified student population is by creating unfair exams and an uninviting learning environment. She shot down any shot at my future appreciation of this subject. I feel like I haven’t established sufficiently just how unreasonable her exams were. I was taking organic chemistry and physics in concurrence with this course and this class blew them both all the way out of the water in terms of difficulty. I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful TA team, and they were the only forces working to keep this course on track and achievable—shoutout Sarah Robinson and Zoe Coker, may your brie be room-temperature and your kefir be chilled.

The professor was a very nice person, don't get me wrong. The lectures were a snooze fest however. You can not pay attention in lecture and copy down only whatever is on the projected screen and do as well in the class as otherwise. If you are somebody who is interested in studying music theory then I would be interested in the class. However, this class is so so so so incredibly disorganized. Part of this could have to do with my particular TA, but interest you have in the music and wanting to be exposed to the culture is just sucked out of you by the amateur way in which this class is presented. For tests, you realize quickly that lectures are spent mostly by the professor talking tangentially about music for the first half hour plus and are pretty useless, as taking tests really boils down to memorizing the people and terms the TA sends you on the study list. But back to the disorganization. When it comes to the final essay, for instance, it is never clear at all what time exactly anything is due, there are really ambiguous instructions as to how to format things, which are exacerbated by the TA sending you ten different emails and the professor never sending out formal due dates or times. The whole organization does a very terrible job at captivating you, making you interested, as it is pretty much just a history class. Nobody in the class, even the music students, seemed interested. Twitter was on everybody's laptop screens during lecture. If you want exposure and discussion of music, or to be captivated by the culture applications of music, I'd take another class. Just took the final today, so INCOMPLETE means I haven't gotten my grade yet