I'm a big fan of Robert Greenberg's lectures on music. Glinda and I are watching How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, and I've finished his series on J. S. Bach, and -- my personal favorite -- Music as a Mirror of History. As with the latter, this course on symphonies shows us that Professor Greenberg is not just astonishingly well-versed in music, but that he has a remarkable ability to contextualize that music, allowing the listener to understand the influences that helped to create, in this case, individual pieces of work, but in the case of the more general surveys, the entire oeuvre of the composers he covers. A good example, for me anyway, is how Shostakovich, who has never been a big favorite of mine, is put into the context of the composer's life in Soviet Russia, under Stalin (an unenviable position for any artist) and has now become both accessible to me, and someone I actively want to listen to.

I never listen to a Greenberg course without finding that there is some composer or piece of music that now speaks to me where before he/it felt like so much noise. In this survey I came to a greater understanding of Bruckner, a composer I'd sorta enjoyed, but never cared enough to explore more deeply, and discovered that I actually like the music of Charles Ives, Roy Harris, and Samuel Barber. Sadly, even Robert Greenberg hasn't been able to make Hector Berlioz remotely interesting to me. *yawn*

If there is a weakness it grows out of the limitations of the course. There are simply too many symphonies and too many symphonic composers to cover in-depth in any such course. So much has to be edited out, or reduced to a mere mention that it's frustrating to think about how much more we could be learning if there was simply more time. If I could offer a suggestion to the good professor, I would say, please give us a lecture series on more contemporary composers. I want to learn about (just off the top of my head) Henry Cowell, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Joseph Becker, and David Diamond, as well as William Grant Still, and yes, more Shostakovich please! More insight into their work and influences would be appreciated.

If you love classical music, but feel you want to understand more about it, and come to a deeper appreciation of the forces which shape it, you can't do much better than listen to Professor Greenberg. ( )

I'm a big fan of Robert Greenberg's lectures on music. Glinda and I are watching How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, and I've finished his series on J. S. Bach, and -- my personal favorite -- Music as a Mirror of History. As with the latter, this course on symphonies shows us that Professor Greenberg is not just astonishingly well-versed in music, but that he has a remarkable ability to contextualize that music, allowing the listener to understand the influences that helped to create, in this case, individual pieces of work, but in the case of the more general surveys, the entire oeuvre of the composers he covers. A good example, for me anyway, is how Shostakovich, who has never been a big favorite of mine, is put into the context of the composer's life in Soviet Russia, under Stalin (an unenviable position for any artist) and has now become both accessible to me, and someone I actively want to listen to.

I never listen to a Greenberg course without finding that there is some composer or piece of music that now speaks to me where before he/it felt like so much noise. In this survey I came to a greater understanding of Bruckner, a composer I'd sorta enjoyed, but never cared enough to explore more deeply, and discovered that I actually like the music of Charles Ives, Roy Harris, and Samuel Barber. Sadly, even Robert Greenberg hasn't been able to make Hector Berlioz remotely interesting to me. *yawn*

If there is a weakness it grows out of the limitations of the course. There are simply too many symphonies and too many symphonic composers to cover in-depth in any such course. So much has to be edited out, or reduced to a mere mention that it's frustrating to think about how much more we could be learning if there was simply more time. If I could offer a suggestion to the good professor, I would say, please give us a lecture series on more contemporary composers. I want to learn about (just off the top of my head) Henry Cowell, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Joseph Becker, and David Diamond, as well as William Grant Still, and yes, more Shostakovich please! More insight into their work and influences would be appreciated.

If you love classical music, but feel you want to understand more about it, and come to a deeper appreciation of the forces which shape it, you can't do much better than listen to Professor Greenberg. ( )