I Love the 80s!

Contemporary composer Paul Swartzel certainly draws from the masters of classical music for inspiration. But in addition to Beethoven and Haydn, Swartzel studies commercially successful songs from the 1980s for lessons on how to write great music - and how to descriptively write about music for non-musicians. Host Frank Stasio talks with Swartzel, a graduate student in the Department of Music at Duke University, about how Milli Vanilli and Public Enemy can influence today’s classical composers and the course he teaches at Duke called “I Love the 80s.”