Great Course - How to Listen to and Understand Great Music

I have completed it. 48 disks, 45-minutes per disk, but now I know (a little about) "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music."

As I've heard these Great Courses, I am struck by a couple of things. First of all, there is so much to learn! Second, and very importantly, it's hard to retain it all! I find that, unless I write myself some notes, force myself to repeat certain facts over and over, or write a blog about it, I tend to forget things, even if I thought they were really cool at the time.

This course, more than some of the others, proved that point. I wrote down a few of them previously. So, I must write down here some things I learned. For those of you who have a music background, I'm sure these points are basic, but, hey, there's a first time each of us learns something!

• Classical music -- or what I thought of as "Classical" is really three different kinds of music: Baroque, Classical and Romantic. Renaissance music was pre-Baroque, and I might have thought of it as "Classical" but it's more likely I would not have known what to call it.
  
• Understanding "Sonata form" is a key to being able to understand many of the aspects of music.
• Baroque music, with its specific rules for construction, clearly grew out of a culture enamored with Newtonian ideas of a "Clockwork Universe."
• Bach's Lutheran beliefs were very important inspirations to him. Cool.
• Classical music is much more stirring than Baroque (in my book) because it is more dramatic.
• Mozart was so extraordinary in talent. Though we might think a typical composer just comes up with ideas and writes them down, fully formed, it was only a true uber-genius like Mozart that could do so. (Oh, and his middle name was not "Amadeus." But I don't care; I'll still pretend it was.)
  
• I would never have guessed that Beethoven, in particular his 5th Symphony, would have been the start of Romantic music.
  
• Romantic music reflects the "art for art's sake" and "the Artist as judge" concepts I think of as being the way musicians have always thought, yet clearly before the Romantic age, that was not true.
  
• Romantic music's co-incidence with the Enlightenment makes perfect sense, and I liked the connection with Impressionism in painting.
  
• Judging what will be breakthrough, great music seems impossible for laymen, and certainly for music critics.
• I liked parts (much) everything up through Stravinsky (excepting the majority of opera, sorry) but I don't know if I will ever appreciate Shoenberg. Pierrot Luniere sounds like work for the listener.
• There is a lot of great music I need to have... Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Debussy, and Stravinsky.
  

This was another excellent course, and its course book will be one I will refer to frequently over the years to come, I suspect.


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