Little Music Note

September 26th, 2009 by Reb

        Currently I am taking an online course titled Music After 1900. This is a very fascinating age for music history as the music we listen to nowadays more or less contributes greatly to our society. So, in the course of next few months, I’ll be introducing the great composers and their music from this era. 

        In my previous music history experiences, I’ve came across music before 1900 much more than music after 1900. So this course is something completely new for me. I was then very curious as to what this course is really about. In the readings for first week, the author mentioned that this course is not necessarily about art music, concert music, classical music, contemporary music, serious music or others like modern classical or contemporary classical music, it is more like foreground music, where it is the “opposite of background music”.

        One important thing the author mentioned is the fact that we have to give the music we listen to its full attention in order to really understand it. This strike me as I find this very important because in the busy world we live in, it is almost natural to be comfortably engaged in “multitasking”. In other words, we are accepted to listen to music while we do other things. However in this course, we are taught that this is not the best way to actively engage and learn intellectually; especially when we are studying music after 1900 and its “fascinating” new elements.

        We like popular music because it attracts us, and most of the time, we do not have to listen to it over and over again to understand its components. That brings on one important aspect about the music presented in this course – durability. The music presented in this course need us to listen to them repeatedly in order to grasp maybe 10% of its real quality. You can think of it like reading poems, Shakespeare poems even! Don’t we all have fun then.

       After understanding what this course will be about, it is also important to know whose music we will be listening to. There are numerous composers grouped in the big genre of “music after 1900”. But we will be specifically looking at the composers that created and defined trends, genres and composed pieces that revolutionized music history. The sentence that sums everything up is “this course will teach you how to listen, and how to describe what you hear”.

Stay tuned for: The Essential Musical Terminologies