All-in-all, the recording of the lectures for “The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works” was as smooth as a peeled onion. We’ve one more major task before us, and that will be the custom-recording of the musical examples by three superb professional pianists: Magdalina Melkonyan, Woobin Park, and Eun Joo Chung. That session will take place in May, at which time I will return to Chantilly, Virginia and report, once again, on the process. In a teaser I posted on my Facebook Page: What fascinating musical tidbit connects Antonin Dvořák’s Humoresque No. 7, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and train lavatories? A number of intrepid readers answered partially, but not completely. Here’s the story. Antonin Dvořák’s composed a set of eight “Humoresques” for piano during the summer of 1894. The most famous by far is No. 7 in G-flat major, which can be heard below: In Dvořák’s day, passenger trains employed something called a “hopper toilet”: human waste was simply deposited on the tracks through what was basically a hole in the floor (euphemistically called a “drop chute”). In the United States, placards hung over the toilets that read: “Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is […]

It’s not unusual that in the course of recording a lecture, I find myself particularly inspired by the music I’m privileged to be talking about. That happened today in talking about (and listening to) Issac Albéniz astounding Iberia of 1909. Iberia consists of twelve separate movements, each illustrating some aspect of Spain or Spanish culture; eleven of the twelve focus specifically on the southern region of Andalucía. As a reminder, I’m recording a course rather clumsily entitled “The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works.” Iberia is as close to a “sleeper” as I have in this course, meaning that of all the featured pieces, it is almost certainly the least well-known. The same could be said of Albéniz himself, whose music is only rarely heard outside of Spain. In his own lifetime (1860-1909), Albéniz and his music had to deal with a sort of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” critical response. You see, for many non-Spanish critics, the lack of German-styled development in Albéniz’s music doomed it to second class status. For these critical wizards, Iberia was nothing but a collection of salon pieces, distinguished only by their virtuosity. For many Spanish critics, Albéniz’s Chopin-and-Liszt-inspired pianism, his Debussy-inspired […]

We had a day off from recording today, though we were still busy little bees. I recorded a series of podcasts with Ed Leon, Senior VP of The Great Courses; the podcasts will go live in a few months. They were recorded on audio only, so I could wear jeans, tennis shirt, and sneakers, my standard outfit when I’m not recording. (I will gladly admit that I am a sartorial disaster area; a walking wardrobe malfunction. Putting nice clothes on me is a total waste, like giving a 16 year-old Lagavulin single malt to a sixteen year-old. As best as I can recall, I think I actually chose a career in academia so I wouldn’t have to wear a tie to work. At this point in time, I can’t think of any other good reason for having made the choice.) (While I’m indulging in gratuitous parenthetical statements: I am asked, usually by friends and family and typically with a bit of exasperation why I always wear black when I work. My answers are always the same: one, it simplifies my choice of clothing; two, the Ninja look allows me to make good an escape into the shadows should it be […]

Making a Course, Part 6: The @#&%^! Piano For me, the biggest single challenge in making a course is playing musical excerpts at the piano. It would seem like a simply thing, really: you make a statement, you sit down at the piano and play an example of what you’re talking about, you stand back up and get back to the lecture. A number of factors make this a tad bit more challenging than it might seem. Factor number one. While I am a competent pianist, I have – as one teacher once gently put it – “accuracy issues” (“Bob, you have great ideas, but you have ACCURACY ISSUES”). This means that given the opportunity, I will play a wrong note. Or two. Perhaps even three. Consequently, I must be über-focused on playing the examples accurately, something made rather more difficult by: Factor number two, which is having to shift on a dime from talking/giving a lecture to playing the piano. Sitting down cold and playing a perfect piano example is often just a matter of dumb luck: I glance at the music, put my hands down, and hope for the best. Speaking of cold: in order to keep the […]

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, when I made my first Teaching Company/Great Courses course back in the spring of 1993 (“How to Listen to and Understand Great Music”, first edition and mercifully no longer available), it was against a “blue screen” background. Blue and green screen backgrounds are the simplest and most commonly used video backgrounds because they contrast most dramatically with human skin colors. Few environments short of white, padded rooms are less inspiring or interesting. The next batch of courses I made were in 1995: “Concert Masterworks”, “Bach and the High Baroque”, and “The Symphonies of Beethoven”. They were all filmed against an erasable white board, on which I wrote – with varying degrees of legibility – the WordScores that accompanied the works under discussion. Again, as sets go, this was ugly bordering on hideous and more closely resembled a classroom environment than a video production. (These courses are still extant, and as a result I have become aware of a visual media phenomena: once one is committed to film and/or video, one will coexist with earlier manifestations of oneself for the rest of one’s days. In 1995 I was 41 years old. I weighed 30 […]

Generally speaking, when you’re self-employed – as I am – the concept of “weekend” doesn’t mean a whole lot. Saturdays and Sundays are work days like any other; deadlines and the whip-hand of my merciless boss make it so. But every now and then there are exceptions, and this weekend is one of them. TGIS – thank god it’s Saturday. After two full days of recording while simultaneously experiencing more rhino-discharge than I care to describe, I am pleased-as-punch to have a couple of days off. Head cold aside, the first third of the course is in the can and it is going swimmingly. As is always the case, a successful production is a team effort, and much of the credit must go to the amazing team of professionals whose job is to make me look good. And while I am not at liberty to discuss The Great Courses team in detail, I would suggest that a look at the credits of any TV show will give an idea of the size of the team: from executive production staff and producer to editors and director to sound techs and camera operators, etc., it takes a village to make a course. […]