How To Get and Keep Kids Interested In Concert Music – Part Three
February
18th,
2013
[caption id="attachment_486" align="alignright" width="300"] To this day, should I hear “Rag Doll” sung by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, I am swept back to summertime in Beach Haven on the South Jersey shore, circa 1965, sights and smells and all. Oh, the incredible power of music.[/caption]It has always seemed to me that there are…
How To Get and Keep Kids Interested In Concert Music – Part Two
February
9th,
2013
[caption id="attachment_482" align="alignright" width="300"] An extremely close approximation of my seventh grade music appreciation teacher[/caption]In my previous entry I promised to hold forth on a subject of concern to many (if not most) of the visitors to this page, and that is how to get (and keep) our kids interested in concert music. Rather than…
How To Get and Keep Kids Interested In Concert Music – Part One
February
8th,
2013
[caption id="attachment_478" align="alignright" width="223"] My daughter Lillian (the one on the left) with our resident Maine Coon, Teddy (the fur ball on the right)[/caption]My six year-old daughter Lillian is going to start piano lessons next week. Lily has been asking for lessons for a couple of years, but I am not a believer in starting…
Gershwin and Copland: American Concert Music Comes of Age
February
6th,
2013
[caption id="attachment_468" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Arguably the greatest songwriters between Franz Schubert and Lennon and McCartney: Ira Gershwin (left) and George Gershwin (right)"][/caption] A heads-up, hope-I-see-you-there: I will be doing a program on February 13 at Sinai Temple, at 10400 Wilshire Boulevard in what we, here in Northern California, call the “South Land” – the City…
The Making of a Course – Part Nine – The Wrap-up
February
4th,
2013
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…
The Making of a Course – Part 8
January
31st,
2013
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;…
The Making of a Course – Part Seven
January
30th,
2013
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…
The Making of a Course – Part Six
January
29th,
2013
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…
The Making of a Course – Part Five
January
27th,
2013
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…
The Making of a Course – Part Four
January
26th,
2013
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…