Audiobook Review:  Great Courses:  How To Listen To And Understand Great Music:  Part I, taught by Prof. Robert Greenberg

Forty-eight lectures of 45 minutes apiece may not be enough time to explain the history of Western music and encourage its appreciation, but the genial and passionate Professor Robert Greenberg certainly starts off giving his best effort here.  It is easy to appreciate this selection of songs, even if he returns to the same ones over and over again to look at different aspects of these various songs of the repertoire and how it is that they say something important about the importance of the context in which music is made as well as the language that we need in order to properly communicate various aspects of music.  Music may be intensely abstract, but the professor does a great job in making these lectures both intensely entertaining as well as immensely full of worthwhile information.  Education and entertainment go hand in hand, at least for those of us who appreciate the repertoire of Western music.  And, as is proper to do, this appreciation goes all the way back to the beginning of Western music, and the author includes some surprising examples of songs that have survived from the ancient and early medieval world.

The eight lectures of this particular part of the course (there are six parts overall) give a context to the role and place of music in the Western world.  The instructor begins with an introduction to the Western musical tradition, discussing what this particular collection is not as a way of properly framing the expectations of the listener (1).  After that there is an examination of some of the surviving Greek and Latin songs from antiquity, which are hauntingly beautiful in their own way, before discussing the plain chant of the early medieval Church (2).  This leads into a look at the music of the High Middle Ages, including the odd but lovely Quant Et Moi, with its diversity of increasingly complex polyphony (3).  The professor then moves into the Renaissance where he introduces the period (4), before focusing on the works of des Prez and Palestrina (5).  An entire lecture is spent on the madrigal and its role in the late Renaissance search for expression (6) before the instructor introduces the Baroque period (7), spending some time looking at the birth of the opera.  Finally, this part closes with a somewhat technical discussion of the stylistic features of Baroque music, including a brief tutorial on pitch, motive, melody, and texture (8).

What is it that makes this instructor so enjoyable to listen to?  Part of it is his undeniable passion about music.  If you are passionate about music, and I am, it is easy to appreciate the way that the instructor can be enthusiastic about everything from ancient songs written in notation on monuments to early operas and the music of diverse and often obscure figures.  Likewise, the instructor infuses this course with a great deal of knowledge.  Some of this includes technical knowledge like how one describes music as conjunct or disjunct, some of it includes the ability to pick apart various layers and look not only at music over a diverse geographic and temporal and stylistic range, but also to appreciate the social and historical context in which the music was made.  Somehow the author manages to simultaneously praise the creative individuality of composers along with the institutional context of the Roman Catholic Church in allowing music to survive during the Dark Ages and also comment on ways in which composers had to deal with problems of how to fit different parts, different instruments, and express both eternal truths and personal ideas and whimsies.  All of this leads to a complex but rich appreciation for music provided by a warm and engaging professor, all of which makes for an enjoyable listening experience.