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How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition

By: Robert Greenberg, The Great Courses
Narrated by: Robert Greenberg
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Summary

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2006 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2006 The Great Courses
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What listeners say about How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition

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Wonderful

I am enjoying this course enormously. It is entertaining and instructive. I like particularly the integration of music clips with the discourse.
My only and small niggle is the narrator’s use of American examples when perhaps many of his listeners are not from the US.

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Comprehensive & Entertaining

The narrator Robert Greenberg has such a warm, friendly, and enthusiastic personality I am sure he could make any subject interesting. He certainly manages to make this lengthy and sometimes detailed review of great music through the ages well worth listening to.
I enjoyed the musical snippets and the anecdotes, quotes and biographical components the most. Some of the technical discussions were less enjoyable but thankfully these were balanced and outweighed by an overall engaging insight into the history of great music.

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Enjoyable and informative.

This is the 2nd of Robert Greenberg's lecture series I've listened to (the other was the opera lectures). He has such a good, easy style. I have learned so much without trying (I've not been following the downloadable notes, just bee listening on the go). I will now seek something else out in the series. I can't recommend them enough.

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Fantastic and informative listen

Despite having absolutely no musical background I found it easy to follow and appreciate. The enthusiasm and easiness that Professor Greenberg gives his lectures made it a very enjoyable listen.

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Simply excellent

This is a wonderful review of Western orchestral/classical music. The scope of this course is breathtaking yet brilliantly organised to give hearers a sense of how it all 'hangs together'.

I particularly enjoyed the enthusiastic, laugh-out-loud, knowledgeable presentation. Very highly recommended.

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Brilliant. Entertaining. learning so much.

really enjoying this course. interesting entertaining. sometimes have to listen to a lecture twice to take in some of the detail. Wish I had done a course like this years ago.

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Phenomenal

Robert does such a great work. I have learned so much and the passion that Robert gives on the subject just makes it even more interesting and worth reviewing. I've always enjoyed Classic Music and now I know why, Thank you so Much

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32 hours is not enough!

Robert Greenberg goes on massive tangents at times and can get very effusive. He can also be ridiculously pedantic (getting upset with people saying concertos instead of concerti). In a 32 hour series, he says there is no time to explain the difference between a major and minor key (although he spends hours waffling on about the Italian language).

There are bound to be issues with what he misses out. We have two lectures on Beethoven's 5th, but the 9th hardly gets a mention. The whole series is heavily weighted towards the Baroque and Classical eras. He seems to rush his way through the late nineteenth century and the coverage of the twentieth century is very light (Shostakovich is barely mentioned!).

Overall though it's very good, especially for Bach and Mozart.

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That's what I call teaching. 💚

Wonderfull lecture that opens up the world of many great composers to the listener.

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Engagingly told

Very interesting, engagingly told by the author. Not the deepest in music theory, more about biographies of composers than I had anticipated.

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