How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition
In this course of 48 lectures, we
will cover the history of Western music and its connection to the social,
political, and religious events and aesthetic ideals of its time. The course
opens by exploring the ancient Greek Doctrine of Ethos, based on the
Pythagorean view of music. The Greeks recognized the power of music to heighten
the expressive power of words and used music in their drama for that reason. We
then move to Rome, where the decline of the municipal authority of the Roman
Empire has led to the Roman Catholic Church becoming a temporal and spiritual
power, fostering the ideal of music as a “servant” of religion. Out of the
tradition emerged plainchant, a monophonic genre of music that was cultivated
virtually unchanged for centuries until the development of composed polyphony
in the High Middle Ages, circa 1000-1400. Having explored the foundation of all
Western music to come, we move through the developments of Machaut, Desprez,
and Palestrina, to the restrained music yielded by the Renaissance, and the expression
of the Baroque Era. The rise of opera and public concerts lead us into the era of
humanism and the 19th century Romantic Era story-tellers, like Beethoven
and Berlioz. We end by looking at those who changed the course of Western music
history by inducing riots and breaking rules: Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Throughout
the course students will write reflections based on their close-listening of musical
excerpts from each genre covered.
