Overview

Forever change the way you listen to music with this outstanding course that explores the history, composition, and sublime accomplishments of Western concert music.

Great music is a language unto its own, a means of communication of unmatched beauty and genius. And it has an undeniable power to move us in ways that enrich our lives – provided it is understood. If you have ever longed to appreciate great concert music, to learn its glorious language and share in its sublime pleasures, the way is now open to you, through this series of 48 wonderful lectures designed to make music accessible to everyone who yearns to know it, regardless of prior training or knowledge.

It’s a lecture series that will enable you to first grasp music’s forms, techniques, and terms – the grammatical elements that make you fluent in its language – and then use that newfound fluency to finally hear and understand what the greatest composers in history are actually saying to us. And as you learn the gifts given us by nearly every major composer, you’ll come to know there is one we share with each of them – a common humanity that lets us finally understand that these were simply people speaking to us, sharing their passion and wanting desperately to be heard.

Using digitally recorded musical passages to illustrate his points, Professor Greenberg will take you inside magnificent compositions by Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and more. Even if you have listened to many of these illustrative pieces throughout your life – as so many of us have – you will never hear them the same way again after experiencing these lectures.

List of Video Lectures

1. Music as a Mirror

47 min

• Sources: The Ancient World and the Early Church

45 min

• The Middle Ages

44 min

4. Introduction to the Renaissance

46 min

• The Renaissance Mass

45 min

6. The Madrigal

45 min

• An Introduction to the Baroque Era

45 min

• Style Features of Baroque-era Music

48 min

9. National Styles: Italy and Germany

46 min

• Fugue

46 min

11. Baroque Opera, Part 1

45 min

• Baroque Opera, Part 2

48 min

• The Oratorio

44 min

14. The Lutheran Church Cantata

47 min

15. Passacaglia

45 min

• Ritornello Form and the Baroque Concerto

46 min

• The Enlightenment and an Introduction to the Classical Era

45 min

• The Viennese Classical Style, Homophony, and the Cadence

46 min

19. Classical-era Form: Theme and Variations

48 min

20. Classical-era Form: Minuet and Trio: Baroque Antecedents

44 min

21. Classical-era Form: Minuet and Trio Form

47 min

• Classical-era Form: Rondo Form

49 min

• Classical-era Form: Sonata Form, Part 1

43 min

• Classical-era Form: Sonata Form, Part 2

46 min

25. Classical-era Form: Sonata Form, Part 3

46 min

• The Symphony: Music for Every Person

43 min

• The Solo Concerto

43 min

• Classical-era Opera: The Rise of Opera Buffa

45 min

29. Classical-era Opera, Part 2: Mozart and the Operatic Ensemble

44 min

30. The French Revolution and an Introduction to Beethoven

44 min

• Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Part 1

45 min

32. Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Part 2

46 min

• Introduction to Romanticism

44 min

• Formal Challenges and Solutions in Early Romantic Music

46 min

35. The Program Symphony: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Part 1

45 min

• The Program Symphony: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Part 2

49 min

• 19th-Century Italian Opera: Bel Canto Opera

46 min

38. 19th-Century Italian Opera: Giuseppe Verdi

48 min

• 19th-Century German Opera: Nationalism and Experimentation

46 min

• 19th-Century German Opera: Richard Wagner

46 min

41. The Concert Overture, Part 1

44 min

42. The Concert Overture, Part 2

47 min

43. Romantic-era Musical Nationalism

46 min

44. Russian Nationalism

46 min

• An Introduction to Early 20th-Century Modernism

44 min

• Early 20th-Century Modernism: Claude Debussy

45 min

• Early 20th-Century Modernism: Igor Stravinsky

45 min

• Early 20th-Century Modernism: Arnold Schönberg

46 min