"I feel like a missionary sometimes," Amy Beal, assistant professor of music, said. In her second year at Bates, her mission is to get students to think differently about music.

Students perform experimental music in her seminar, which lets them learn music rather than just learn about music. It's a hands-on learning environment where, Beal hopes, students learn to think independently. "It's about more than music, she said. "It's about letting go of the belief that what you're taught is right is always right."

Beal's first-year seminar students performed a program of American experimental music recently at the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. The group, many seated in the audience, began the performance scattered around the room. Sounds echoed sharply around the hall as each student slowly banged large rocks together to an internal rhythm.

The concert included John Cage's "4'33," known as his "silent piece," which instructs the musicians not to play for a set duration in hopes of drawing attention to the natural sounds inside the concert hall. Cage's point: There's no such thing as absolute silence. During the semester, the class studied group improvisation with a piece by Fredric Rzewski, which explicitly invites non-musicians to play.

The students found performing the music challenging, Beal said. "It forced them into the position of putting this music out there and dealing with other peoples' reaction to it," she said.