In review--In appreciation of European Art Music
Book review
How to Listen to
Great Music
A Guide to its
History, Culture & Art
Robert Greenberg
Plume Book/Penguin
I’m a music appreciation junkie and when I find a music
appreciation book with a flowing narrative, theory that’s explained in a way I
can understand, and biographical details of composers tossed in, I climb on
board. I have taught music appreciation
courses, but my focus was on world and folkloric music. Robert Greenberg, a composer and music
historian not only teaches through the pages of How to Listen to Great Music, but he also teaches a series through
his teaching company, Great Courses.
In this book, he gets us started with medieval and
renaissance music and then we’re off into the baroque, classical, romantic and
post modern eras--starting with Gregorian chant and landing in the terrain of
Arnold Schoenberg. We learn about fugues
and musical structures from each of the musical/cultural eras as Greenberg
delves into the minds and emotions of the composers. And did I say that reading
this book provides entertainment too?
Greenberg has a dry sense of humor that most of us outside of the
academic world get.
However, the downside of this book is that it focuses on the
main composers from Italy and Austria/Germany mostly and we don’t hear about
the composers from Spain, Finland, Norway, England, or the United States. We also don’t hear about any women composers,
which sadly, is usually the case with music appreciation books and
courses. Perhaps, in this regard, the
book offers a jumping off point where we get the basics and then go off and
explore composers not mentioned in the pages of this book such as Ravel,
Sibelius, Elgar, Hildegard of Bingen and Marie de France on our own.
If you enjoy hearing more about Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms,
Mahler, Bach and the opera composers of Italy and Germany, then you’re in
luck. And Greenberg does cover the
basics of culture, history and structure while placing it into context we can
understand even in our fast-paced high-tech world.
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