Welcome to ETSU OpenBucs, the Open Buccaneer University course system,
brought to you by East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee.
This course is Introduction to Music!
So, who might want to take this class?
Let's see if you fit into one of these categories!
Are you an audience member who goes to concerts and you just want to know more
about what you're listening to?
This could be the course for you!
Do you not really get what the whole classical music thing is about and all
your friends talk about it, or maybe somebody
you know and love
really loves classical music and you think, well, maybe I should learn
something about it so I can talk to them.
This is the place for you!
Maybe you're a young musician and you just like to know more about what it is that you
are learning how to do.
So you're playing composers... that you don't know who they are. You can learn about them
in this course!
Maybe you're just a lifelong learner and you just want to know everything you can learn
from wherever you can find it.
This is the place for you!
And there will be many other courses you can choose from in the future so we hope
that you will stay with the OpenBucs program and choose some more of our
courses as time goes by.
So let's talk about this course.
What's it about?
This course is about art music.
That means
what you would think of as Classical music. We call it art music because to
a musician
Classical means it happened in the seventeen hundreds.
It's a very limited category but
anything that you would think of as being
what they used to call long hair music, you know those things fuddy duddy people listen to
and get all dressed up to go to,
that's the kind of music that we're talking about.
It's not fuddy duddy though!
I mean, I'm
fairly old, not that old, but I have lots of students who love this kind of
music and love to perform it so
it's really everybody's music, but that's what we're going to be talking about.
Yes, we'll talk some about popular music but only because
popular music comes out of the Classical tradition.
I'm reading a book by Marcus Samuelson who's a great chef and he was talking
about cooking in terms of having to learn about French cooking
and he's a very diverse chef. He's from Ethiopia, he likes to talk, you know, throw in
all kinds of ingredients but he said
being a chef
is like being a musician.
You've got to know about Bach
before you can do modern stuff.
So as a chef you need to know about French cooking so you could do something
else. So,
the same thing happens in music. Popular music draws from a long tradition.
In fact we'll talk about some pieces of modern music that actually
incorporate classical pieces.
So that's one of the things we'll be talking about.
So let me talk about all the parts of the music.
What are the bits and pieces that make up a piece of music?
You might find this really eye opening because even the music you listen to all the time,
your everyday music, is made of exactly
the same things
that art music is made up of. Everything has melody, and we have harmony, and we have
instruments, and voices. All those things are our language. So you'll be learning the
language of music.
You'll be learning about instruments.
Mostly orchestral instruments. We may talk about a few other ones, but mostly
about the instruments of the orchestra
and about human voices which is the very first instrument. They were there
before anybody played anything.
We'll be talking about
groups of instruments or what we call ensembles.
How do we put them all together? Why would we put them together? What composers
put those things together and why?
We'll be talking about
the different styles and periods of music. As I said, most people think Classical
music is... all of it!
But Classical music is really just a very small segment. It's like the
shortest period of any of them!
So we'll talk about music from the 1600's and we'll talk about music from
the modern period, how those things are related,
and how we got from the 1600's up to the kind of music that we use now
in the modern period and how those things are all related.
We'll talk about the major composers. You'll learn about Mozart, and Beethoven, and Brahms
and
Shostakovich and people like that.
So, you'll be able to talk about
the major names of art music.
We'll talk about important works
in the various different periods so that
hopefully when you finish the class
you turn on your local
public radio station, they're playing some mystery piece of music and you haven't heard
what they're playing, you can say
"Oh, you know, I think that's from the Baroque period because it has a harpsichord,
and they're doing lots of little trills and things and I learned
that that's what Baroque music is like and then you'll feel really proud of yourself.
I know you will, cause I feel proud of myself when I can do that,
and I've been doing this a long time so, hopefully you'll have that skill by
the time you finish.
We'll also talk about how music is related to history,
and how it relates to
the other arts, so about theater and dance
and visual arts.
For myself, I'm a musician, I've been doing this for very long time.
I was in graduate school before it ever occurred to me
that Mozart
and the American Revolution were at the same time.
Nobody ever taught that when I was taking classes. Like music happened over here!
Everything else happened over here!
And I find that really disturbing because
the music comes out of the history.
The culture history, all those things work together
it's like a big...
another kitchen here... we'll take my Marcus Samuelson analogy a little further.
It's a kitchen
that all works together. So I want you to know how those things
work together. What's happening in the world
while Mozart is doing his thing? What's happening
while opera is coming about? Those things are important!
So that's the kind of things that we'll be covering in this class.
What we're not going to do
is teach you how to read music
or how to write music.
That's a very different set of skills and if you're interested in doing that
there are certainly lots of websites that can help you do that but that's not the
point of this class.
Now you don't have to read music for this class, in fact
there's not going to be any music to be read. You're going to do a lot of listening,
and that's the real purpose of this class.
So let's talk about our goals!
We basically have four goals and I'm using these
pretty fancy technical terms because
these are the goals that our institution uses as the guidelines for all the
courses that we teach that are like this.
So, four things!
The goal of this class is that you should be able to analyze
a significant work of art
as a form of creative and cultural expression. So that's where connecting
all that historical information to a piece of music is really important.
But you also have the elements so you'll be able to talk about how the structure
of the piece
is also
related to those other elements.
Number two!
You should be able to explain the ways in which artistic expression throughout the ages
expresses the culture and values of its time and place.
Again, you've got to know the history. You have to know about other arts to be able to do
that.
Third, we're going to look at some global and cultural diversity
Music is the most
global
thing there is.
I guess the art people would say their's too but we'll take
all the arts together. The arts,
everybody has arts.
So we will look at lots of different things. We'll be focusing on
what we call the western canon of music so mostly the kind of composers you
would know about
but we'll also talk about Chinese music
and Native American music and other kinds of music so that you can see that
we really all have
the same sources.
And the final element is that we want you to be able to practice
the critical and analytical methodologies
of the fine arts.
What does that mean?
It means you need to be able to talk about music in the way that musicians talk about it.
So, we'll talk about
using the right vocabulary for the music that you're listening to and being
able to describe it.
And to think about it, sort of take it apart in the way that a musician would. Obviously
that's not going to be in the first couple of weeks. That's a skill that
takes some development.
But by the time we finish, hopefully you'll be able to take a piece of music that you
know, like your favorite song, and say
"Oh, well you know,
that's in duple meter and it's in this kind of form and it's using these
instruments, and oh, did you hear how they did that?
And you'll be able to really make some critical judgments about the music that
you've listened to on a regular basis.
So basically if we took all those four things and I translated it into one
big goal,
this would be it!
In this class you will learn to listen to music,
to describe it,
and to analyze it
using what you know about history and culture
and the elements of music.
So those are our goals.
That's what you should expect to get out of this class.
Now let me tell you a little bit about myself!
My name is Dr. Mary Dave Blackman and I'm on the music faculty here at
East Tennessee State University.
I've been teaching this sort of course for probably
twenty-five years.
Now when I started college
this was never
what I thought I would be doing.
When I started college I was a music education major
and my goal was to teach people how to be band directors. That's what I was going
to do.
Just like when I started as an under- graduate, I was going to be a band director!
That was it!
And then I discovered research and all sorts of fun things! And Oh! Well, let's do that instead!
So as my college career has progressed
I started teaching this class because somebody has to teach it. That's sort of
how we all get into it.
But I discovered that I really love it!
This is a chance for me to talk to people who generally
think they hate
Classical music,
and they think opera is screaming ladies and that's really sort of their whole mental image
of it,
and my goal is to try to get these people
to at least give it a try.
We'll go back to my kitchen analogy! Taste something different!
Try it! You may not like it and that's ok. I don't care if you like everything
you hear.
But I would be happy
if you learn to like something that you didn't think you liked before.
So I came to this,
it's just sort of a
backdoor thing
but I've been doing it now for 25 years. This is mostly what I do now!
And I really, really love it!
I get to introduce people to things that I love,
and in the process of doing that I've learned so much myself because I have to really
study
so that I can present what I know to you.
And if you've ever tried to teach somebody how to do something that you
already knew how to do really well, even if it's something like
playing soccer,
you know how to do that, you know how to kick and do whatever it is you do when you play soccer!
I don't play soccer!
But when you try to teach someone who's never done it what to do, what's the first step?
Where do you start?
I've had to think about all that in all the years I've been teaching this class so...
I'm really excited to be able to share this with a large audience!
I think a really important part of a class like this is generating audience.
And I play in our symphony in Johnson City,
and one of the things we're always trying to do is get new audience members in.
It's hard, you know, it's like...
"I'm afraid to go there!" So we want to make you less afraid to go to a
concert
and maybe you do go and maybe you don't like it, and that's fine. I'd ask you
to try it twice though because maybe it's just that music you didn't like!
Let's try another piece of music and see if you like it.
But this is a way
for me to
get people interested in being an audience member.
If you live near a university campus, there are tons of concerts to go to!
Students are performing all the time!
And my students go and they write these reports and they say, "Gosh, you know I never knew there
were people my age who
like that kind of music and who did this stuff!"
This is exciting for them, they go, "Wow, there's another twenty
year old over here who
plays
the saxophone.
They're not playing jazz. They're playing some French composer I've never heard of
but it's really cool.
So that's one of the things I would love to see.
I probably won't get to see you of course because you're out there wherever you are and
I'm here but
I'm hoping that you'll be out there testing out new things as you go!
Another thing that I think is important
is that you be able to talk
intelligently about music.
My stepson works in a dental office
and when he was young I used to take him to the opera
and of course when he was twelve that might not have been the coolest thing
he'd ever done
but now that he's a grown man and he has a job
he's talking to his boss one day and he's saying, "Oh yeah, I went to see
Carmen... you know I really like this part of it, and his boss is like
"Wow!" You know here's this guy who works in a dental office, he's the business manager
but he can talk about something else.
So I really think it's important for everybody to have
a breadth of knowledge.
I can talk about something besides music
and I can talk some science. I can't talk chemistry very well so chemists don't ask
me questions, I don't know much chemistry.
But I think everybody needs to have a balance in their life
and if you know something about the arts and you learn about more than just music
in this class
then you can be
a much more interesting person to be around,
and that's
really what I think is important.
I don't expect everybody to love the music the way that I do and I don't love
all the music myself. No musician loves everything!
But if you learn to like something
and you learn
how it
relates to your life
and how it can be...
how it can enhance your life,
I think that you will really come out of this course
knowing what I would like you to know!
And that's our introduction to the course!
So let's get started with the material!