Out Now: Music as a Mirror of History

My thirtieth course for The Great Courses/The Teaching Company, “Music as a Mirror of History”, was released on Friday, July 22. (My friend Ed Leon – the Chief Brand Officer for The Great Courses – and I have a running dispute regarding how many courses I’ve made for TGC. Ed insists the number is twenty-eight, as the first and second editions of “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” are out-of-print, having been supplanted by the third edition. Yes, it is true that “only” twenty-eight of my courses are currently in print and available. But. I have indeed made and recorded thirty courses, and the fact that two of them are out-of-print doesn’t unmake and un-record them. So Eddie, baby, I’m sticking with my number thirty! I trust I will be forgiven this sin of numerical pride.)

“Music as a Mirror of History” was a challenging course to write and, with its often emotionally charged subject matter, an even tougher course to record. We’ve put together a ten-minute excerpt from the first lecture that effectively outlines (if I don’t mind saying so myself) the goals and overall content of the course. Check out the video and then, hopefully inspired to your cockles, head to The Great Courses website and purchase copies for everyone you know and care about (and perhaps even folks you don’t know and don’t care about!).