For students interested in listening to the sounds and lyrics of The Beatles, they may do so in a class offered at EC called “Music of the Beatles.”

The class has been offered since Spring 2011, Dr. William Doyle, music professor said.

“It fills up instantly. I always have to turn away people,” Doyle said.

This course is considered a general education class and transferrable to the Cal State University and University California colleges.

The goal of this class is to survey all of the music of the Beatles and find the appreciation for the musical group that has contributed to the generation of rock and roll and influenced the present day pop culture.

“Anybody who knows a lot about music wouldn’t have to justify why you study the Beatles,” Doyle said.

For the convenience of EC music majors, this course if offered on Wednesday afternoons from 2-5 p.m. because there is nothing scheduled during that time, Doyle said.

Doyle deems that it is important for music majors to take advantage of this course.

“When I wrote the class, I wrote it so that music majors that are thinking about going into either song writing or perhaps a commercial career would understand why people that are pop bands today still refer back to the Beatles,” Doyle said.

Oppose to the other music appreciations courses at EC that survey European classical music and music of the Bourke period, “The Music of the Beatles,” class is strictly on the music the Beatles wrote while they were a group.

“It covers all 13 albums that they wrote, all 212 songs that they did, all the movies that they did, it’s a lot of material,” Doyle said.

Although it is a lot of material the idea is to leave the class knowledgeable about the Beatles.

“The point is when you leave the class you’ll be a connoisseur, you’ll know enough about their music that you can talk intelligently about their music, what they wrote, how they wrote it, what they did in the studio to create their stuff,” Doyle said.

Students of this class like Gannon Tanji, 20, Japanese major, find this class to be fun and interesting.

“If anybody is looking for any art requirement credits, I’d say take the class. It’s fairly straightforward and a lot of the homework is just listening to the music and getting you to appreciate something that influenced music that you would listen to today,” Tanji said.

Another student, Storm Rhode, 23, Japanese major, also agrees that this course is worth taking.

“It manages to stay really interesting without straying from also being educational,” Rhodes said.

Overall, the class is transferable and a great source to learn about historical music icons.

“The hardest part of this class is at the end of semester you have to pick your favorite song,” Doyle said.