How to Listen to and Understand Great Music

What Hacker News says

1. joshstaigerMar 2023
   I highly recommend Robert Greenberg's "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" if you have any interest in Classical.

   Available on audible:

   https://www.audible.com/pd/How-to-Listen-to-and-Understand-G...

   It's long (36 hours, broken up into ~45min lectures), but very engaging and accessible. He goes through the entire history of Western music from Pythagoras through the 20th century. He covers everything from (very basic) music theory to how trends in society and technology influenced the music that was produced in each period.

   After listening to the whole thing, it gave me a much more fully formed mental model of how different eras, composers, and styles relate to each other.

   And from there it's become much easier to dig in and appreciate different areas of the repertoire, rather than idly trying to absorb disparate pieces that would come up on radio/streaming.

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2. irrationalSep 2021
   There is an audiobook called How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. The author starts way way back with the oldest music we have and then little by little moves forward to more modern times showing how music grew little by little over the millennia. The audiobooks includes audio excerpts of the music. I found it fascinating up until the classical music time when it started bogging down and going a lot slower.
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3. banachAug 2020
   To learn to appreciate concert music I can warmly recommend the Great Courses’ How to Listen to and Understand Great Music: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-to-listen-to-and...
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4. ssttooJun 2020
   "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" by Great Courses is really good. The lectures are by a professor/composer.

   Forget about consistency or naming conventions. But you'll get a lot more out of the listening experience once you know a bit about different composers from different periods: baroque, classical (talk about confusing!), romantic, contemporary. Now when I dial the classic radio station I can often tell the period and even the composer even if I've never heard the piece before. Fun :)

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5. p15Apr 2018
   An excellent introduction to this topic is a lecture series called “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” by Robert Greenberg.

   It’s very rich in detail but Greenberg also makes it accessible and fun.

   It’s available for cheap on audible and from “the great courses”.

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6. sotojuanSep 2017
   If you want a course, Robert Greenberg's How to Listen to and Understand Great Music - it's on Audible.
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