Wonderful

I am enjoying this course enormously. It is entertaining and instructive. I like particularly the integration of music clips with the discourse.
My only and small niggle is the narrator’s use of American examples when perhaps many of his listeners are not from the US.

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1 person found this helpful

Comprehensive & Entertaining

The narrator Robert Greenberg has such a warm, friendly, and enthusiastic personality I am sure he could make any subject interesting. He certainly manages to make this lengthy and sometimes detailed review of great music through the ages well worth listening to.
I enjoyed the musical snippets and the anecdotes, quotes and biographical components the most. Some of the technical discussions were less enjoyable but thankfully these were balanced and outweighed by an overall engaging insight into the history of great music.

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Enjoyable and informative.

This is the 2nd of Robert Greenberg's lecture series I've listened to (the other was the opera lectures). He has such a good, easy style. I have learned so much without trying (I've not been following the downloadable notes, just bee listening on the go). I will now seek something else out in the series. I can't recommend them enough.

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Fantastic and informative listen

Despite having absolutely no musical background I found it easy to follow and appreciate. The enthusiasm and easiness that Professor Greenberg gives his lectures made it a very enjoyable listen.

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32 hours is not enough!

Robert Greenberg goes on massive tangents at times and can get very effusive. He can also be ridiculously pedantic (getting upset with people saying concertos instead of concerti). In a 32 hour series, he says there is no time to explain the difference between a major and minor key (although he spends hours waffling on about the Italian language).

There are bound to be issues with what he misses out. We have two lectures on Beethoven's 5th, but the 9th hardly gets a mention. The whole series is heavily weighted towards the Baroque and Classical eras. He seems to rush his way through the late nineteenth century and the coverage of the twentieth century is very light (Shostakovich is barely mentioned!).

Overall though it's very good, especially for Bach and Mozart.

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4 people found this helpful

That's what I call teaching. 💚

Wonderfull lecture that opens up the world of many great composers to the listener.

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Engagingly told

Very interesting, engagingly told by the author. Not the deepest in music theory, more about biographies of composers than I had anticipated.

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Exceptional introduction to western music!

If this were a book, it would be the best I'd ever read. But a book could only teach a certain dimension of this subject of music, this is better than any introductory book could be on music. Dr Greenberg's knowledge and infectious enthusiasm along with the narrated musical examples means the history, genres and forms of western music are presented here in a way far superior than any book could manage.
It is detailed yet accessible and engaging with only the minimum of music theory required to get a lot out of it.
The teachings of Robert Greenberg are part of the reason I was accepted onto a degree in Music Education as a mature student.
Having viewed and or listened to a lot of Robert Greenberg's work, my only complaint, nay wish now is that he had a version of this course and or others, that used and went into detail on the actual sheet music. He uses his own ‘word scores’, which are descriptions of what’s happing in the music to help us understand what's going on. These are great because it's the remit of this title to be accessible. Unfortunately, now that I'm studying for a degree in music, I sometimes need details from the scores and I've yet to find anyone that analyses music using scores with the knowledge and engaging delivery that Dr Greenberg has in this audiobook/course.

As a throughout yet accessible introduction to western art music, this is as good as it gets!

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Simply excellent

This is a wonderful review of Western orchestral/classical music. The scope of this course is breathtaking yet brilliantly organised to give hearers a sense of how it all 'hangs together'.

I particularly enjoyed the enthusiastic, laugh-out-loud, knowledgeable presentation. Very highly recommended.

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Brilliant. Entertaining. learning so much.

really enjoying this course. interesting entertaining. sometimes have to listen to a lecture twice to take in some of the detail. Wish I had done a course like this years ago.

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