Course Description
Western Music History: Too Many Notes is a music history course for experienced Pinewood Music students. The students have already studied a brief history of Western music, and how it relates to drama and visual art, in Humanities, a required Freshman course. Furthermore, the students have already studied music fundamentals, theory, the instruments, orchestration, and Contemporary popular music history in Music Fundamentals. Western Music History, then, assumes this knowledge and launches straight into a much more in-depth study of significant pieces, composers and currents in Western fine art music history.
We use the college textbook "Listening To Music," by Craig Wright of Yale University, and its accompanying 6-CD set. Listening assignments from the textbook are used. The students complete the listening assignments and read the text as homework during the semester. Whenever possible, we watch and discuss a DVD or video of the selected piece of music.
In addition to the textbook, we study and discuss several other masterpieces of the repertoire that are of particular interest to Mr. C or the students. And, despite the fact that it gives Salieri a really bum rap, we watch Amadeus! Poor Antonio. He just doesn't get his due.