Ebook949 pages16 hours
How to Listen to and Understand Great Music (Transcript)
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
How to Listen to and Understand Great Music is the companion book to the audio/video series of the same name. It contains a full transcript of the series as well as the complete course guidebook which includes lecture notes, bibliography, and more.
About this series:
Know thy enemy. That's what the wisdom of history teaches us. And Adolf Hitler was surely the greatest enemy ever faced by modern civilization. Over half a century later, the horror, fascination, and questions still linger:
About this series:
Know thy enemy. That's what the wisdom of history teaches us. And Adolf Hitler was surely the greatest enemy ever faced by modern civilization. Over half a century later, the horror, fascination, and questions still linger:
- How could a man like Hitler and a movement like Nazism come to power in 20th-century Germany – an industrially developed country with a highly educated population?
- How were the Nazis able to establish the foundations of a totalitarian regime in such a short time and hurl all of Europe - and the world - into a devastating war that would consume so many millions of lives?
Read more from Robert Greenberg
The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works (Transcript) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works (Transcript) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The String Quartets of Beethoven (Transcript) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Listen to and Understand Opera (Transcript) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to How to Listen to and Understand Great Music (Transcript)
Related ebooks
A History of Musical Style Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Classical Crossroads: The Path Forward for Music in the 21st Century Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5New Illustrated Lives of Great Composers: Liszt Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInterpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Real Toscanini: Musicians Reveal the Maestro Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Complete History of Music Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Outline of the History of Music Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeethoven and His World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHaydn and His World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow Music and Mathematics Relate (Transcript) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beethoven's Orchestral Music: An Owner's Manual Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Student's Guide to Music History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Read and Understand Shakespeare (Transcript) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Look at and Understand Great Art (Transcript) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat Makes It Great: Short Masterpieces, Great Composers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hear Classical Music Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The World's Greatest Paintings (Transcript) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDiscovering Classical Music Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClassics of American Literature (Transcript) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Classical Music For Dummies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Secret Lives of Great Composers: What Your Teachers Never Told You about the World's Musical Masters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Year of Wonder: Classical Music to Enjoy Day by Day Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Classical Music Insights: Understanding and Enjoying Great Music Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRichard Wagner: A Life in Music Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/512 Essential Scientific Concepts (Transcript) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beethoven's Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Wars & Military For You
The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Daily Creativity Journal Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mein Kampf: The Original, Accurate, and Complete English Translation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe God Delusion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Doctors From Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unacknowledged: An Expose of the World's Greatest Secret Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Last Kingdom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of War & Other Classics of Eastern Philosophy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sun Tzu's The Art of War: Bilingual Edition Complete Chinese and English Text Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unit 731: Testimony Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wager Disaster: Mayem, Mutiny and Murder in the South Seas Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the SS: The Hunt for the Worst War Criminals in History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies: The Civil War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Making of the Atomic Bomb Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art of War: The Definitive Interpretation of Sun Tzu's Classic Book of Strategy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for How to Listen to and Understand Great Music (Transcript)
Rating: 4.637930903448276 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
58 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I listen to The Teaching Company's Great Courses on my commutes and with the exception of one on Native American Peoples to start this year, the rest have been concert music oriented. Greenberg has a ten artist series on the lives and music of great masters and the one I am finishing now, of the same title as this. It's a 48 lecture companion course and I highly recommend listening to it in parallel to reading this. Greenberg is energetic, entertaining and eminently knowledgeable. I can't begin to capture here even a fraction of the breadth he covers. There is depth, to be sure, but Greenberg masterfully surveys the monumental repertoire of modern western music from ancient Greece (yes! they've managed to reconstruct a couple of pieces from stele and pottery!) through medieval times through Baroque, Classical, Beethoven (per Greenberg, he sort of is in his own category), Romanticism and early 20th century modern composition.He describes the language necessary to understand the music of the different periods in their context and he frames those periods with histories of the times and the composers he illustrates. Art does not shape its time; rather, the times shape the artist, who then gives voice to his time in his own special way. To understand an artist’s world and something of the artist herself are the first requisite steps to understanding the artist’s work, its style, and its meaning.I know somethings of music theory, but I'll need to visit this book and the lectures again to absorb the language further. Tonality, motivity, timbre, phrasing, melody, themes, recitative, aria...this book describes the concepts well, but the reader also needs to be a listener. At the least, find the music selections Greenberg uses.A few highlights:We would do well to avoid the notion that art is linear, and that , somehow, it just keeps getting better as we go along. Certainly, art— and for us, music— gets different as it goes along. Just as, certainly , the musical language itself—that is, the actual materials available to composers —has grown as we’ve moved toward the present day.This is important. As Surrealism is no better than Expressionism is no better than Impressionism is no better than purely representational art, Debussy, Stravinsky, Mahler are no better than Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt which are no better than Beethoven, Mozart, Bach. They are all great in their own ways and Greenberg tells us why. Greenberg says that instrumental music is the ultimate abstract art. Plays or literature are bounded by the words in a language we understand. Painting is framed by two dimensions. Sculpture must occupy the three-dimensional space that contains it. The only dimension that instrumental music is contained by is time. And the Baroque era was when these concepts were developed: An essential step in the emergence of instrumental music during the Baroque era was the development of instrumental musical forms.[...]One might think that when it comes to instrumental music, anything is possible; that a composer can sit down and just go with the inspirational flow and write whatever comes to mind. In actuality, the opposite is true: the abstract nature of instrumental music demands tremendous compositional discipline and rigor to create musical and expressive clarity and coherence in the absence of words."When we read a book or a poem, when we watch a play, we understand, at the very least, the language the author is using, and unless it’s Pynchon, Joyce, Gödel, or the lyrics to 'I Am the Walrus,' we usually understand what the writer is trying to say." When we hear instrumental music, we don't have the explicit language from the composer to describe what he/she is doing, or trying to convey. There might be a consensus, but it is still interpretation. Greenberg says "In vocal music, it’s the poetic structure of the words being set that almost invariably determines the form, the structure, of the piece of music that results." And "But instrumental music has no a priori literary structure on which to base its form; in instrumental music, form is the result of compositional processes: repetition, variation, contrast, and development."To illustrate nuance in music, Greenberg gives an entertaining lengthy and exhilarating (intended) step by step, play by play, Harry Caray style accounting of a baseball double play, to which a foreign person unfamiliar with baseball asks, “What is double play?” Greenberg describes the structure (nine innings, two halves per inning, three outs per half) and intimates at the nuance (me: pitch, ball, hit, walk, strike, flyball, ball, hit by pitch, single, triple, fielder’s choice, ground rule double, etc...) Without a context, nuance cannot possibly be understood or appreciated. Without a sense of the large scale structure, we can’t understand the detail which makes things so interesting. How many times have we heard a baseball announcer say, “I’ve been around this game for 40 years and I’ve never seen that happen!”? So, despite the formula nature of the structure, an infinity of nuance and detail can take place, but we can only understand it if we first understand the large scale context, the process, the form of the piece.Well, Greenberg talks about form in all the eras. And so much more....music—the most abstract of all of the arts—is capable of transmitting an unbelievable amount of expressive, historical, allegorical, metaphorical, metaphysical, and even philosophical information to us, provided that our antennae are up and pointed in the right direction. That is why we listen, constantly, to music. Yes, to be entertained and amused, but even more, to be thrilled: to be enlightened, edified, reminded of our humanity, and to experience that white hot jolt of wordless inner truth that is the special province of musical expression.Read this and go have a listen.
Book preview
How to Listen to and Understand Great Music (Transcript) - Robert Greenberg
Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1