http://www.thegreatcourses.com/music
This is a course about Western music, that is, European-based music. Yes, we understand that our planet boasts many other ancient and magnificent musical traditions—in China, in India, in West Africa, in Indonesia, even in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, to name just a few. We however, are limiting our study to Western, that is, European-based music.
Some Definitions: Concert Music—concert music is music we will hear in one of those reanimation facilities, a concert hall, a recital hall or an opera house. More often than not, such music is referred to as "classical music," which is in fact, a misnomer. The term, classical music, refers properly to music composed during the Classical Era, between roughly 1750 and 1805. Let us then use the infinitely more appropriate term, "concert music" to address the concert repertoire as a whole. Concert music it is; that was easy. Less easy is drawing a distinction between concert music and popular music. What is the difference between the two? In practical reality my friends, there is often little difference at all. For example, I'm going to play the very beginning of two contemporary piano works; one of them composed in 1788 and the other, eleven years later, in 1799.
Now for us here today, we would consider them both to be examples of concert music. However, in their time, one of them was considered a ferocious, avant-garde work intended for the connoisseur, while the other was considered a melodically direct work intended for a much wider audience. It won't be difficult to figure out which is which. We start with the beginning of the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in C Minor, op. 13, of 1799. Musical example: Beethoven, Piano Sonata in C Minor, op. 13, 1799.
[Plays excerpt]
Filled with harmonic dissonance and expressive foreboding, this music is serious, profound and was considered, in its day, to be dangerously modernistic. There is nothing in that opening to suggest that this music was intended to have—or would have had—any mass appeal whatsoever.
Now another piano sonata composed just eleven years before, a sonata that we today would consider a concert work but in its own time was considered popular in almost every sense. We hear the opening of the first movement of Wolfgang Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Major, K. 545, of 1788. Musical example: Mozart, Piano Sonata in C Major, K. 545, 1788.
[Plays excerpt]
Mozart purposely engineered that music to be tuneful and accessible and to be relatively easy to play; in a word, to be popular. The point—by the standards of Mozart's day, his Piano Sonata was considered a popular composition. By our standards, it is considered to be concert music. The point—one era's "music of mass appeal" or popular music, like Mozart's Sonata, or Verdi's operas or Scott Joplin's rags, to name just a few examples, become another era's "concert music."
So back to the distinction between popular and classical music, or should we say now properly, concert music. For now, let's put it this way—something we, today, consider a concert work, will generally be longer and will display higher information content in terms of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and formal detail than a work we consider as being popular.
We will take a three-prong approach to the music we will study in this course. Prong number one, cultural environment. We will examine the social, political, economic and religious environment that shaped the composer's under study and the musical style in which they worked.
Prong number two, art for art's sake. We will focus on certain representative works not only as musical examples of their time, but also as objects of art unto themselves with their own idiosyncratic expressive and structural content.
Prong number three, vocabulary. We're going to need to develop some listening skills and a vocabulary that will allow us to first isolate, and then identify certain types of musical events.
Let's look at and listen to this music as a living, breathing, utterly relevant body of work—a mirror of its time and place that can teach us not just about its own time and place, but much about ours as well.
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History of the New Testament I The Great Coursesby TheGreatCourses2,122 views
We love prof Greenberg and have almost all his courses.
AdamKulju 1 month ago
It seems like the term "classical music" is so entrenched it is hard to avoid
spamdude1 8 months ago
I like the term "orchestral music" better, since all genres of music involve concerts.
But I pick nits. This is very entertaining and I'm definitely tempted to buy the course.
EyeLean5280 8 months ago