Robert Greenberg

Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author

The Making of a Course

Looking back on the first edition of “How To Listen to and Understand Great Music”

I have managed to dig up and digitize a television advertisement for the first edition of my Teaching Company/The Great Courses survey “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” from 1993. It’s a bit painful for me to watch: I weighed 30 pounds less than I do now; I had all my hair (including a very large moustache); and I wore contacts. I looked good, but most painful of all, I looked young. When I recorded that first course in May of 1993, The Teaching Company had four full-time employees, including its founder, Tom Rollins. At the time, the company had just moved to its first “dedicated studio” in Springfield, Virginia, just south of Washington D.C.’s outer loop. Yes, it was a “dedicated studio”, but the company was still in its infancy, and the production values were crude (to put it mildly). I worked in front of a blue screen and a blackboard, read from a sheaf of notes in my hand, and used a small upright piano located on stage. The method by which we mastered the musical examples was particularly primitive. For that first course, our licensing agent sent me music on cassettes. I then dubbed the […]

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Recording Music as a Mirror of History

Photos from the recording session from my upcoming course for The Great Courses — Music as a Mirror of History:

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Recording the Pianists at The Great Courses – Part Two

Today we had the opportunity to meet and hear the third of our three pianists, Eun Joo Chung. She recorded the excerpts for two great and most virtuosic works: Johannes Brahms’ “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel” and Aaron Copland’s “Piano Variations”. She was absolutely stunning. Some logistical info. The studio in which we are recording is a fairly large room, in which the piano is placed dead center in the middle. At any given moment, there are five or six people in the studio. First (and obviously), there is the pianist. Then there are three camera-people, operating, as one might expect, three cameras, which are arrayed around the piano. I am seated at a table to the side, from which I can talk to the pianist and monitor events. Finally, there is my Academic Content Supervisor Cat Lyon, who when called upon leaves the adjacent control room and joins us in the studio in order to turn pages for the pianists I would call your attention to the three camera people. My friends, it is a defining skill that good camera people (and I would tell you that The GREAT Courses employs GREAT camera people) are unflappable: […]

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Recording the Pianists at The Great Courses – Part One

As anticipated in my previous post, I have travelled to Chantilly, Virginia – HQ of The Great Courses/The Teaching Company – to oversee the recording of the musical examples for my latest course, “The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works.” The three professional concert pianists tasked with recording the excerpts are Magdalina Melkonyan, Woo Bin Park, and Eun Joo Chung. We began recording today and will continue for a total of five days. Each day – thanks to the cleverness of my producer, Jaimee Aigret – is divided into two parts: 8:30 AM to 1 PM, and 1 PM to 5:30 PM. Each “part” is assigned to a different pianist. Thus, we will record two pianists per day. They are recording on a Steinway “B”. (Sadly, the elevators here at The Great Courses could not accommodate a Steinway “D”, meaning a full concert grand. Having said that, our “B” is a molto fine instrument, which was last played – so we are told – by Harry Connick Jr. in a concert in Baltimore roughly three weeks ago.) This is what we are asking our pianists to do. Walk into a chilly (those with thinner blood might say FREEZING) studio and warm […]

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The Making of a Course – Part Ten

Tuesday, May 28th I return to The Great Courses/Teaching Company studios in Virginia to complete work on my latest course: “The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works.” We recorded the actual lectures back in January and early February, a process well-documented on this site (scroll down for the blogs I wrote during the recording process and for various studio pix). This next week will be dedicated to recording the actual musical examples that will be heard (and seen) during the course. In the past, such musical examples were excerpted from recordings. This time around, we’re doing something entirely different. We have hired three wonderful, young concert pianists who will together custom-record our musical examples. Among the many advantages of doing things this way is that I will have some say over the interpretive content of the performances. We will also be video recording the pianists, so those who purchase the video version of the course will have the added advantage of seeing as well as hearing the excerpts performed. (And who doesn’t like to watch a great pianist in action? To my mind there’s nothing in the musical world quite as awesome as watching a great pianist perform: her hand speed […]

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The Making of a Course – Part Nine – The Wrap-up

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 […]

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The Making of a Course – Part 8

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 […]

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The Making of a Course – Part Seven

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 […]

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The Making of a Course – Part Six

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 […]

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The Making of a Course – Part Five

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 […]

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