Images of women in low-cut dresses, and Handel’s musicians floating down the river.

Ayoung couple, two middle-aged women, a middle-aged man and a young woman formed a circle on couches and chairs in the living room of a Woodland Hills home Monday evening. They were ready to begin their weekly communion with the spirit of the Baroque.

Their leader, 30-year-old Greg Hettmansberger, sat on a metal chair at the most prominent spot, between two large stereo speakers standing on the floor. He had removed his pinstripe coat and unbuttoned his shirt a notch. His wife Carrie, in a pink candy-stripe dress, handed out apple juice, sodas, coffee and pound cake. Then she sat at Hettmansberger’s side.

He began to talk about Domenico Scarlatti, the composer.

“He is famous only for writing pieces for harpsichord,” Hettmansberger said. “Nobody knows how many because some of them may be lost. I’ve picked about 500 of them for tonight. No, just joking.”

Musicians always tell bad jokes, Hettmansberger said.

Hettmansberger teaches music appreciation in his home every Monday evening. It’s how he stays in touch with what he really wanted to do in life.

Hettmansberger fell in love with classical music when he was only 7 and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. He planned to be a concert clarinetist.

Instead, he got married and became a dishwasher. Facing reality, the Hettmansbergers moved west, settling in the San Fernando Valley. She became an optometrist’s assistant. He became a contractor’s salesman.

But he never lost the love of music. A couple of years ago he began teaching a class in music appreciation at Everywoman’s Village in Van Nuys.

“I felt there was an audience of adults that have listened to classical music all their lives, but really don’t know much about it,” he said.

He was right. One of his first students was Teddi Kessi, a middle-aged Valley business owner. She said she was searching for psychic relief.

“It’s a tough world,” Kessi said. “Rough, cruel, crazy, violent. Everybody has to quiet down sometime or you’ll get crazy. Some people meditate. But that’s boring. You’re supposed to get in touch with yourself. I hate that.”

Kessi tried going to classical concerts. She said she liked them but didn’t understand them. So she went to Hettmansberger’s class. And when Hettmansberger moved the class to his own home, she stayed with it.

On Monday, bouncing into the house in a red tartan skirt and matching scarf, Kessi took her usual seat at Hettmansberger’s right.

He opened the lesson with a sketch of Scarlatti’s life and musical contributions. Then he played six recordings of short pieces by the composer.

In the second hour of class, he moved on to Vivaldi.

First he played a concerto for two trumpets. He pointed out that the trumpets seemed to call to one another out of different speakers. That’s how Vivaldi intended it, Hettmansberger said.

“We get the idea that stereo and quadraphonic was invented in the 20th Century,” he said. “Actually, it was invented centuries before that. Vivaldi uses the same effect with the trumpets.”

In the Baroque they called the sound antiphonal, “two sounds opposed,” Hettmansberger said.

His class had an antiphonal quality. He delivered the lecture matter-of-factly, sometimes reading from a thick book, “The History of Western Music.” From time to time, Kessi’s voice broke in, high-pitched and effervescent.

“When he said he was going to do the Baroque, I thought it would be so boring,” she said at one point. “Then I found out it was a sexy, scandalous time. I saw all the pictures of the women in low-cut dresses. And the boat parties! Tell us what you said last week about Handel’s Water Music,” she demanded.

Hettmansberger recapped the story of Handel’s musicians floating down the river on a barge.

“I can just picture myself in one of the villages hearing that music,” Kessi said, dreamily.

Then Hettmansberger returned to Vivaldi. He said the famous composer liked jokes too. He wanted his best-known work, “The Four Seasons,” to sound like pictures, so he wrote silly sonnets to tell what the pictures were.

The spring sonnet was full of blossoming flowers, bubbling brooks and barking dogs.

The poetry wasn’t very good. But it evoked pictures.

“The viola is the barking dog,” Hettmansberger said. It sounded like a barking dog.

The second hour of class was nearly over when the last bark fell silent. Hettmansberger picked up his book to read the sonnet for “The Summer.”

His wife tugged his cuff and whispered in his ear.

“We’re not going past summer,” he assured her.

The summer sonnet was about languorous heat, buzzing flies, lamenting countrymen, and zephyrs rustling the leaves.

The finale of the piece came with a frenetic burst of violins.

“That sounds like Santa Anas,” a student said.

“Those are the strong north winds,” Hettmansberger said.

When it was over, he read the last line of the sonnet: “ ‘Beheaded are the trees, crumpled the grain.’ ”

“Not a very happy ending,” he said.

But the music, if not the poem, had been uplifting.

“This is an oasis,” Kessi said. “I always leave here feeling so refreshed.” On her way out, she hugged both Hettmansbergers. The rest of the class shook hands.