Day Two

Today we got started a little late but jumped in and began to discuss the various ways to approach music history. It is weak to study music history chronologically by time periods due to the lack of precision of date. For example, we often point to the death of Beethoven as the start of the Romantic era in music, but truthfully Romanticism began long before 1827 and certainly Beethoven himself could be considered a Romantic composer. In addition, it is silly to claim the Baroque era began in 1600 and ended in 1750. Yet from a general style sense and perhaps a social development angle, there is a certain amount of truth in dividing up music by time periods.

Another system might be the study of root movement and harmonic development. Some may say that the Renaissance (1400-1600) emphasizes the perfect 5th, the Baroque (1600-1750) the perfect 4th, Classical (1750-1827) the major 3rd, Romantic (1827-1900) the minor 3rd, Impressionism the major 2nd, and the 20th century emphasizes the half-step. Yet, there are plenty of arguments against this kind of approach as well. Other approaches to a study of music history include a social kind of thought unique to each country. While this has weakness (very slippery to try to label all Germans a certain way), nationalism certainly must play a role in studying music history.

We spent a few minutes discussing the nature of music, the future of music (is it headed toward microtones?) and what music means. In this discussion we established that a tone poem tells a story or has an extra-musical meaning whereas absolute music does not. Yet, a listener may ascribe meaning to music based on the sound and the association of the sound. In fact, it is likely that listeners often associate sound with something non-musical such as a feeling or an object or an event or even a person. This then expands music's meaning to the level beyond simply sound.

On the other hand, perhaps it is true that all sound is music in that sound results from vibration. Regardless of the organization of the sounds or the human responses to the sound, it seems to me that music is simply sound. We may prefer a certain type of system or a texture or even a quality, but ultimately preference does not define the nature of music, it only defines our own taste and preferred system. Since I find this to be suspicious, I have an expanded definition of music to include all sounds regardless of the organized (or lack of organized) system or the human response.

Jumping into the exam, we discussed each term and composer to try to establish the time framework. We spent a little more time on the terms that reference earlier music such as tropes and sequences, conductus, and organum. It would be beneficial for the students to look up these terms and place them in the context of the Middle Ages and the Roman Catholic Mass.

We discussed Minimalism, 12-tone (panchromaticism), serialism, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. We spent a little time on Mahler and Dvorak and talked about the folk-song influence. It was all quite enlightening I'm sure and fun. We are looking forward to the next class period where we will finish the tests and do some listening.

We also pointed out the value of the website www.lcsproductions.net for an excellent overview of music including styles, composers, time periods, and terms. I would like you to review the middle ages essays and follow up on the links provided. You will need to go to the Music History portion on the website. I also encourage you to study the composers list.

Class One

We discussed the format of this course and reiterated the importance of attendance. Much of the class will be discussion and listening with information presented on this blog. In addition, the classes will be videoed and placed on this blog for perusal. We are working to develop a comprehensive understanding of the history of music including all styles of music and its theoretical components. Recognizing this is an ambitious project, we will capsulize much of the information with the hope that students will supplement through web resources available. Rather than approaching this course chronologically, we have decided to play ping-pong with music history by starting at the beginning then bouncing to the present. As we move forward and backward, the plan is to end with the Romantic period! Kind of different, but we established that most weakness seem to be in the areas of early music

We then took our first examination to determine our own weaknesses and begin the process of synthesizing and assimilating the vast quantities of musical information. We did not discuss a mental approach to the test, since doing so would might prejudice the overall thinking, but we did discuss the two ways (actually there are more) to approach the time periods of music history. In a discussion of Richard Strauss for example, it is difficult and almost anathema to pigeon-hole his music into Romantic or 20th Century. He was primarily a "Romantic" composer in style, operating mostly in the 20th Century.

We took a moment to play some trivia with regard to composers who wrote nine symphonies=Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak, Bruckner, and Mahler. We also discussed how Palestrina wrote 104 Masses. Oddly Haydn wrote 104 Symphonies as well. A little more trivia: was Handel an English composer or German. We decided to consider him more English due to the success he experienced while in England.

So the hour concluded by grading our own tests which we will continue doing on Thursday. See you then.