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    Understanding the Fundamentals of Classical Music
    Understanding the Fundamentals of Classical Music
    Understanding the Fundamentals of Classical Music
    Audiobook7 hours

    Understanding the Fundamentals of Classical Music

    Written by Richard Freedman

    Narrated by Richard Freedman

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 3, 2008
    ISBN9781436173933
    Understanding the Fundamentals of Classical Music

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    Reviews for Understanding the Fundamentals of Classical Music

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    • 3/5
      This series of lectures on Classical Music is part of The Modern Scholar group of audio courses. Each chapter focuses on a musical form or style, or illustrates several common, related themes. Audiobooks work best for this sort of instruction -- snippets of music illustrating the points made reinforce the what was just learned in the lecture.Unfortunately, the subject is quite vast, and each 20 minute or so lecture really doesn't do much beyond scratching the surface. One or two examples often aren't enough to get a firm grasp on the technical nuances between related styles. Freeman isn't the most engaging speaker, either, I guess I would really like to see a series like this done by Bill McGlaughlin of Exploring Music fame. Not only does he do a better job finding illustrations, but his conversational tone is a little more conducive to learning often obscure minutiae. That he gets 5 hours a week instead of just 20 minutes helps too.