The Break It Down Show hosts Robert Greenberg after the recent launch of the new The Great Courses series “Music as a Mirror of History”:
Continue Reading
Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 73
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 […]
Continue ReadingAs I mentioned in my post of July 1, my next The Great Courses/Teaching company course – “Music as a Mirror of History” – is scheduled for release on Friday, July 22nd. It was recorded in January and February of this year and has been in post-production since. Since it’s my gob that’s on display throughout the finished course, it is all-too-easy to overlook the role played by the incredible crew of professionals who were tasked with producing the course. Well, overlook them we cannot; it’s an absolute truism in the media and the performing arts that we are only as good as the good people whose job it is to make us look good. My thanks to everyone who was involved with the production and a special call-out to my producer, Jaimee Aigret; my editor, Cat Lyon; and my directors, Jonathan Levin and Jim Allen. Thank you, my friends, for making The Great Courses GREAT. For anyone with 17 minutes to burn, I did a Google Hangout/Facebook Live interview with my bud Ed Leon of The Great Courses on Friday, July 1, in which we discuss the new course in some detail:
Continue ReadingA drum roll (okay; perhaps just an onion roll): announcing the upcoming releases of my latest Great Courses survey and my first webcast courses, what I will now refer to as “webcourses”. It’s been a year since I announced my intention to begin self-publishing such webcourses; I have now completed writing two of them. The first is “Mozart in Vienna”, a 16-part course that deals with the last 10 years of Mozart’s tragically short life, from 1781 to 1791. Featuring Mozart’s chamber music for strings, the webcourse focuses on Mozart’s day-to-day life and his amazing compositional development during his years as a resident of Vienna. While there is some overlap with the repertoire covered in my The Great Courses/Teaching Company course “The Chamber Music of Mozart” (recorded back in 2004), “Mozart in Vienna” is considerably less technical than the aforementioned Great Courses survey and explores many works I’ve never before examined, including Mozart’s last four string quartets: the so-called “Hoffmeister” Quartet and the three “Prussian” Quartets. The second webcourse is one I’ve wanted to create for many, many years: an 18-part survey entitled “The Music of the Twentieth Century”. The “music” to which the title refers is primarily concert music, […]
Continue ReadingThe amazing Chicago-based new music group eighth blackbird played a concert in Berkeley’s Hertz Hall yesterday evening (Sunday, February 14th). At the invitation of the group’s Managing Director Peter McDowell, I sat in on their rehearsal yesterday afternoon. The group is phenomenal, and the rehearsal had, in fact, the character of a high-end performance. I was privileged – along with Peter – to be one of the two people in the house to hear the rehearsal. Following the concert, two of the six members of Eighth Blackbird headed home to Chicago, while the other four headed down to Los Angeles. They were up for a Grammy award today, and figured to be in LA today for the awards ceremony. Well DANG: they did indeed win that Grammy, and it couldn’t have happened to a better organization. Let us raise a glass to this wonderful bunch of musicians – and indeed, to the entire new music performing community – that keep new music and composers like myself alive and well. I will be forgiven a brief but heartfelt call out. There is a special place in heaven reserved for such new music specialists as well as for those many, MANY extraordinary […]
Continue ReadingPhotos from the recording session from my upcoming course for The Great Courses — Music as a Mirror of History:
Continue ReadingMy apologies up front for this entirely gratuitous, self-serving, pat-myself-and-The-Great-Courses-on-the-back entry, but this sort of thing does not happen very often (at least not to me), so I’m making hay while I can. Audible.com has just released its current “best seller” non-fiction audio books list, and two of my pieces – “The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works” and “A Brief History of Holiday Music” are on it, at numbers 5 and 9 respectively. Here’s the Nonfiction list – click to see the full listing: Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy, narrated by the author (Blackstone Audio, Inc.) Fry’s English Delight: The Complete Series by Stephen Fry, narrated by Stephen Fry (Audible Studios) The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer, narrated by John Lee (Audible Studios) Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen, narrated by Eric Michael Summerer (Tantor Audio) The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works by The Great Courses, narrated by Professor Robert Greenberg (The Great Courses) Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling, narrated by the author with Greg Daniels and […]
Continue ReadingIt has been said that “Italy gave us the Renaissance and France just about everything else”. It’s a statement that the opera composer Giuseppe Verdi – arch Italian nationalist that he was – would have agreed with entirely. Over the course of his career Verdi lived in Paris for a number of years and profited mightily from the Parisian operatic establishment. And while this straight-shooting, matter-of-fact Italian from the Po Valley was often at odds with his French hosts (“I have lived long enough in France to understand how the French make themselves insufferable by their insolence”), he also understood that Italy and France needed to stand side-by-side in the face of German aggression (“But whoever considers himself to be truly Italian must be above such [Gallic] pinpricks”). Verdi watched the progress of the war between France and Prussia – the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 – with undisguised horror. In a letter written to his friend, the Countess Clarina Maffei on September 30, 1870, immediately after the French defeat at Sedan, Verdi said that it was hard to adequately describe: “The desolation in my heart over France. France has given liberty and civilization to the modern world. Let us not […]
Continue ReadingSheet Music Plus, home to the world’s largest online sheet music selection, and San Francisco non-profit, Composers Inc., today announced a piano composition contest. Professional Steinway pianists at the Steinway Piano Gallery in Walnut Creek and San Francisco will showcase winning pieces and winners will each receive a $300 award, along with a $200 travel stipend should they choose to attend the concerts. Starting today, composers and arrangers can submit original piano compositions among four different categories to the SMP Press platform. SMP Press allows users to upload and sell their original sheet music and MP3s on the Sheet Music Plus website, earning 45% in royalties. Contest submissions are welcome through November 6, 2015. “We are very excited to be partnering with Steinway, the world’s piano leader and nonprofit, Composers Inc. to encourage original and creative piano composition,” said Jenny Silva, CEO of Sheet Music Plus. “Sheet Music Plus has always taken pride in the original work of its member musicians. This contest allows us to celebrate and promote our independent community of composers and arrangers.” “As an advocate for living American composers, Composers Inc. is proud to be partnering with Steinway Piano Galleries of the San Francisco Bay Area […]
Continue ReadingThe Alexander String Quartet and I are doing a benefit fundraiser for the Montclair Elementary School in Oakland on October 10. The Montclair Elementary School is a public K-5 school in the Oakland Hills. Founded in 1925, it numbers among its present students my daughter Lillian (a third grader) and my son Daniel (a first grader). Public education. Pardon me for getting a bit vehement and more than a bit teary-eyed here, but there is nothing more important and yet financially undervalued than our public schools and the magnificent people who teach in and administer them. Yes, yes; it’s cliché to ask, but still: when was the last time the prison system, the military, and our state and national bureaucracies had to hold bake sales, car washes, and silent auctions in order to raise operating funds? When did our national priorities become so profoundly skewed? So raise funds we will, with a program to be held between 6 PM and 9 PM on October 10, 2015 at the David Brower Arts Center at 2150 Allston Way in Berkeley, California. Here’s a description of the program the Alexander String Quartet and I will perform: “Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) and Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791), […]
Continue Reading
Robert Greenberg | Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved