HOW TO LISTEN TO AND UNDERSTAND GREAT MUSIC

One could devote a lifetime to the lectures from The Teaching Company, and it would be a life well spent. Professor Greenberg's forceful, lucid explications of western music exemplify the qualities that distinguish this company's performances: focus, clarity, excellence of pace and organization, an individualistic voice, and delivery that is neither stylized nor intrusive. Greenberg chronicles concert music, public music, as "a living, breathing expression of both its time and place, and our own." Beginning with the ancients and with early church music, he traces the evolution of Western music to 1913 and early modernism. The particulars of time and place and composer may blur a little, but over the course of these 48 lectures, individual pieces of music accompanying the lectures begin, as promised, to "come back to life in all their original intensity, expressivity, and glory." These engaging and illuminating lectures bear, and reward, repeated listenings. D.W. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC 02/ JAN 03]