MUSIC and CINEMA LECTURES (2007)
Music Lectures... Hannah Joicey & Harry Ingham

While most of us at the age of 8 were still having issues with the finer points of bicycling without stabilizers, Mozart was busy writing the first of many a symphony. This fact alone, was enough to keep us totally enraptured by Jane Glover for all of three hours. Even those whose music taste is centered around Black Sabbath and the like admitted defeat - the verdict? Mozart was officially cool. Jane really did have every in and out and out and in story about Mozart's life, and we were truly captivated by this fountain of Mozart knowledge.

Rodney Milnes came next to impress us with his profound operatic genius, and impress is exactly what he did. Interspersed with clips from various operatic performances, he shared with us his opinions and ideas on each and every opera any of us had ever heard of. When asked later by Charlie - "Name three of Mozart's operas", a certain yellow haired individual named Anthony Cotton claimed: "La Dolce Vita?"... someone had obviously over refreshed themselves the night before. However to those of us who did listen (all but one) Rodney really did treat our ears, and our understanding has grown considerably - comparing and contrasting good opera and, I quote Rodney Milnes, "those which you would pay under £140 for."

Next up was Peter Philips, who immediately sat us down to tell us that we would be "taken back into the mists of time". We braced ourselves - the thoughts of car journeys and the sounds of our parents' Capital Gold music too horrifying to contemplate. But it went a little further back, back to the Pre-Renaissance period and 'chant' music, which according to Peter was never invented, it just "appeared". The greatest moments of these lectures was looking at Peter's beaming face and his smile every time some chant music came on, and almost screaming out load with excitement when Thomas Tallis' forty part music was played. It was also exhilarating to watch his miming of the pre-historic cello. But all in all, once again being introduced to a type of music we had had little previous acquaintance with (which is apparently played live sometimes) proved really interesting, and our musical knowledge has grown accordingly.

Music lectures are not to be missed, under any circumstances. Not even a good night in Piccolo's beforehand should deter you.

Cinema programme by Boadicea Meath Baker

The John Hall course intends to give nothing less than a complete cultural education, and the world cinema programme, if you're at all interested in film, is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the course. Not every film is to everyone's taste- I found the Senegalese film Xala hilarious and bitterly satirical, while almost everyone else hated it. Antonioni's The Passenger infuriated me, even if I could appreciate the artistry of its cinematography.

The selection varies from year to year, ranging from fairly obscure films like Xala to better-known European cinema such as Almodovar's Volver. The two films that are always included- La Dolce Vita and The Battle of Algiers- are the two films that I would urge anyone to go and watch, right now, whether or not you're thinking of going on the course. La Dolce Vita is just a work of genius, embodying everything that made Italy so ineffably cool in the 1960s, and I've never seen a film affect people as much as The Battle of Algiers affected our group. When the credits rolled, everyone was silent for a long time.

The moral of the story, so to speak, is just that cinema can be a lot more genuine and a lot more original than the standard Hollywood fare. Stylistically, the independent film Far From Heaven is extraordinarily different to anything made within the studio system, but it works brilliantly as a simultaneous homage and pastiche of the 1950s. Central Station, a Brazilian film made by Walter Salles, was a journey to the spiritual and cultural heart of Brazil as well as a bittersweet story about searching for family. The films on offer may not always be easy to watch, but they're always worth it.