The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works

This course identifies
and celebrates 30 of the greatest orchestral works in the concert repertoire.
Each lecture presents learners with a historical and biographical context for
each work via a guided tour of the work itself. These musical tours include both
piano demonstrations of the piece’s compositional structure and selected excerpts
drawn from recordings. The course is designed to serve learners as a series of
expanded program notes that explores a broad range of orchestral music composed
over the last 300 years: From the baroque era, the classical era, the romantic
era, and the 20th century, the works featured in the course include some of the
most well-known, best-loved, and most frequently performed pieces in the
standard repertoire in the forms of symphonies, concertos, tone poems,
symphonic poems, and suites. By the course’s end, we will understand why each
featured piece is considered “great”; how each reflected, reinvented, and/or
broke from contemporary musical conventions; how each reflected the individual
spirit and nature of its composer; and to what extent contemporary historical circumstances
affected the composition.