Course Syllabus
Lecture 1 Preliminary Thoughts and Encouragements
Lecture 2 On Musical Timbre
Lecture 3 Listening to Texture
Lecture 4 Listening to Melody
Lecture 5 Listening to Rhythm and Meter
Lecture 6 Listening to Harmony
Lecture 7 Kinds of Music
Lecture 8 Concerning Musical Representation
Lecture 9 Listening to Musical History
Lecture 10 Listening to Musical Forms: Sectional
Lecture 11 Listening to Musical Forms: Continuous
Lecture 12 Hearing Minuets, and Other Dance Forms
Lecture 13 Sonatas and Cycles
Lecture 14 Fantasy and Fugue
|
|  | | |
This course is not designed as a chronological survey of musical history and its many stylistic periods or moments, nor an exploration of the lives and output of individual composers. Instead, these lectures focus on the development of listening skills. Through this course you will develop new levels of aural awareness that will allow you to better appreciate the richness, complexity and excitement at the heart of all great concert music.
Music is a performative art. It stresses movement through time and engages our suggestive sense of its passing. Music has tendency, it normally invokes goals of various sorts, both near and far. Music has closure, a sensation not just of ending, but of expecting no more. Music also has accent. It is a dynamic process of stresses and nuance that often varies in dimension from one performance to the next.
My approach in this course will by design be thematic and eclectic. It will juxtapose styles and passages from different works designed to highlight a particular musical concept or aural effect. Don't worry about definitions, those are provided in the glossary at the end of this guide. Instead, concentrate on the musical examples themselves.
We will begin with an understanding of the aural dimensions of sound, line, time and texture. Initially our focue will be on very short passages of music and progress to longer portions later in the course. Master works and master performances are constantly yielding up new riches; this is precisely why they endure in the concert repertory.
Once we have some basic concepts in our ears, we will increase our listening capacity to include some other important elements of works: i.e. the ways they align with other compositions, the ways music can be used to tell a story, and also how the past provides models and vehicles for new developments.
In the last few lectures we will explore the fundamental formal schemes you may hear in concert, such as theme and variation, rondo, sonata and fugues.
This guide is provided to supplement the listening, and is not designed to stand alone. It is imperative to hear the examples, not merely once, but several times to truly understand them. You may want to continue your learning experience by listening to the pieces recommended at the end of each lecture.
 Understanding the Fundamentals of Classical Music (Booklet)
|
| | |
Professor
Professor Richard Freedman
(Haverford College)
Richard Freedman serves as Chair of the Department of Music at Haverford College, where he teaches courses on the history of music. He earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. His undergraduate studies were completed at the Faculty of Musi...
 - Course password Required.
|
Course Forum
Course Final Exam
Music
