Bernstein: A Brief Education in Music Appreciation and Analysys
Whether you fancy yourself a music artisan or aficionado, you’ll find this stuff over the top and off the chart in excellence in music education….
Learning to play is one thing. Learning why is entirely quite another…
01/15/2020 @ 5:58 am
This is frighteningly brilliant. I guess that’s an advantage of going to Harvard, (Bernstein was an alum.) you occasionally get really brilliant lecturers. Even the links to poetry and visual art. I never heard the first lecture but I reached some similar conclusions myself, particularly when I’d heard some people referring to dissonance as cultural and arbitrary when a lot of it is actually physics. He shows the ramifications of that really well. But the Debussy lecture is stunning. And I didn’t know he invented the whole tone scale.
You need a bit of a theory background to understand any of it. I’d be at sea without it.
01/15/2020 @ 1:39 pm
Agreed, the way he worked with ‘Afternoon of a Faun’ took my capacity for understanding my own music to another realm….
Sadly, I lack the chops to play what I now know, even though I can ‘hear’ it way better now than I ever could before…
01/15/2020 @ 7:28 pm
Consider this juxtaposition:
While Claude Debussy was in France inventing the whole tone scale,
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), Scott Joplin was in America inventing Ragtime,The “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899)…
Joplin died in 1917…
Debussy died in 1918…
01/16/2020 @ 5:02 pm
If you want chops to do that, you need classical lessons. You could learn the notes without them over time but not the feel. Bernstein was a serious classical pianist. And a more serious conductor. He was conducting NY and Vienna at the same time if I remember correctly. At a time – still mostly true – when American orchestras wanted conductors with foreign sounding names. The funny thing is it doesn’t matter where the names come from, including countries with way less of a Western classical music tradition than the United States.
01/17/2020 @ 5:45 pm
“If you want chops to do that, you need classical lessons.”
There are capacities and abilities that some people have at birth that cannot be transferred or transmitted.
I’d be more than happy to have the nonclassical chops of Erroll Garner, who couldn’t read any of the music he performed, with elegant virtuosity and apparent ease…
You can’t ‘teach’ natural talent any more than you can show someone how to be lucky….