My 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 […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for The Great Courses – Page 35
Many thanks to everyone who proposed a title for my upcoming Great Courses survey that features musical works inspired by historical events. With the greatest of difficulty, I have managed to reduce the number of potential titles to eleven; fewer than the number of Republicans currently seeking the presidential nomination, but still a big number. But that, my friends, is a function of the quality of the titles you came up with. Our next job, then, is to vote (and I meant that by saying “our next job”, as I am going to submit my vote along with yours). With a little luck (and perhaps some pushing and shoving), the good folks at The Great Courses will accept our vote as binding and the course will so be named!
Continue ReadingThank you all for the wonderful submissions made at my request last week to name my next The Great Courses survey. I will select my 5-10 favorites and present them to you later this week for your vote. I will deliver the results to The Great Courses with the hope that they will indeed let the majority rule. A New Direction? As a self-employed musician-writer, who spends his working days at home, alone at the computer, I can forget how very intelligent and creative the collective can be. You have reminded me of that creative intelligence with your many suggestions and comments regarding my upcoming course. So: using you as a resource and as a sounding board, I’d like to tell you about my plans for the future and in doing so again solicit your suggestions and advice. (If anyone wants to respond privately, or at greater length than Facebook provides, feel free to contact me on this site.) Background For many years, I taught something I called “Living Room Classes” here in the San Francisco Bay Area. They were just that: classes taught in the evening to interested adults in various living rooms across the Bay Area. It was […]
Continue ReadingIt has been a long time since I last blogged. I have an excuse (sort of) which I’d share, and in doing so request your help. I have been writing a new, 24-lecture course for The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, and have only today – this morning, in fact – finished the first draft. I began work in December, so the draft (which runs about 140,000 words, about the length of a 450 page book) took seven months to write. I’ll need another three months to rewrite, by which time the course will run about 120,000 words. It has been, by far, the toughest survey I’ve ever written. The working title is “Big History and Great Music.” The premise is as follows. Each lecture features a different piece of music. Each piece of music was written as a direct response to a historical event. The bulk of each lecture, then, will explore that event and the manner in which the music under study reflects that event. For example. Lecture 17 focuses on a piano sonata by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček (pictured below as a young dude with his wife Zdenka), a piece entitled Piano Sonata I. X. 1905 (meaning […]
Continue ReadingI’ve done a good bit of travel by air over the course of the last 35 years, long enough to observe (and experience) an incredible degradation in air travel. To my mind, airports themselves have always been bad. I long ago decided that once I entered an airport – any airport – it was best to assume I had entered a maximum-security “rehabilitation facility”. With this in mind I could accept that the airport, as a manifestation of fate, controlled my destiny. My time no longer belonged to me; nor did my body, and if the “airport” chose to delay (or cancel) a flight, or hold me at passport control, or pull me out of a security line and subject me to a cavity search, my best recourse was – and remains – to keep my mouth shut and do my best to go with the flow. In sum: I don’t particularly like airports. (Especially now that the prices in duty-free are, like, twice what you’d pay in Costco. What’s that all about?) Once boarded and underway, the actual flights were, for me, infinitely less onerous. There was food to eat, empty seats to stretch out on, unlimited bags to […]
Continue ReadingEnjoy five excerpts from the “Great Masters: Shostakovich — His Life and Music” course in a new playlist on the Robert Greenberg YouTube Channel. Lecture highlights in the playlist: Shostakovich — His Life and Music: An Introduction Lady Macbeth The Fifth Symphony The Tenth Symphony The Eighth String Quartet Buy the Course More Great Courses Discover the extraordinary life, times, and art of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975), great musical master and flawed but faithful witness to the survival of the human spirit under totalitarianism. He is without a doubt one of the absolutely central composers of the 20th century. His symphonies and string quartets are mainstays of the repertoire. But Shostakovich is also a figure whose story raises challenging and exciting issues that go far beyond music: They touch on questions of conscience, of the moral role of the artist, of the plight of humanity in the face of total war and mass oppression, and of the inner life of history’s bloodiest century.
Continue ReadingA most interesting article on The Great Courses (TGC) appeared in the New York Times on Saturday. TGC has been featured in newspaper articles before: scads of articles, in fact, over the last 20-plus years. But those articles (at least the ones I’m aware of and I am aware of most of them) have always focused on the content of TGC offerings: that they are academic courses offered up on audio/video media. This article, written by the Times’ TV critic Neil Genzlinger, is different. It focuses on TGC as a video production company and on TGC courses as slick, professional, high-end television programs. My goodness, how times have changed. Long-time readers of this blog will recall my descriptions of TGC in its early days. I would rehash a bit of that if only to highlight the incredible evolution of the company from a startup to the polished gem it is today. I made my first course back in May of 1993: the first edition of “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music”. We had no “set”; I worked in front of a blue screen (or a “traveling matte”). The halogen lighting created an unbelievable amount of heat and glare. […]
Continue ReadingOver FOURTEEN of my courses on sale during The Great Courses Spring Warehouse Clearance. Take advantage of courses up to 70% Off Today! On Sale Courses include: The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works How to Listen to and Understand Opera Bach and the High Baroque Concert Masterworks Music of Richard Wagner Life and Operas of Verdi Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Chamber Music of Mozart String Quartets of Beethoven Operas of Mozart Great Masters: Tchaikovsky — His Life and Music Great Masters: Haydn — His Life and Music Great Masters: Shostakovich — His Life and Music Great Masters: Liszt — His Life and Music And more!
Continue ReadingI receive all sorts of (usually lovely) mail and email from all sorts of folks asking all sorts of questions, mostly about music but not infrequently about other things as well. You will – I’m sure – be relieved to hear that for now I will focus on the former, reserving my advice on dating, brands of gin, and whether the martini should be shaken or stirred for another time. For now, it’s on to one of my most frequently-asked-questions, and that is: if my Great Courses surveys were a curricula, in what order would I suggest they be consumed? It’s a good question (at least I think so). Courses numbers one, two and three as identified below might be considered the basic prerequisites to the remainder of my catalog. Course number one: “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music”, 3rd edition (2006). I know, this is pretty much a no-brainer; it’s The Great Courses’ equivalent to Music 101, “tunes for goons”. Please, please, please, the 3rd edition only. The second edition (from 1998) is flawed, and the first edition (1993) was made during the Stone Age. Course numbers two and three: “How to Listen to and Understand Opera” […]
Continue ReadingI trust we all raised a glass last Thursday on the 10th of October in honor of Giuseppe Verdi’s 200th birthday. Now, I am aware that with the exception of “belated birthday cards” (“I really crapped up, I’m embarrassed to say; but I had better things to do than remember your day”), we generally do not continue to celebrate birthdays after the date has passed. But 200th birthdays should – rightly – be considered an exception, and thus October of this year has been unofficially designated as “Giuseppe Verdi Appreciation Month”. In Italy in particular, the celebration goes on, with Verdi festivals and opera performances up and down the peninsula. With this in mind, I will be on my way to Italy in just a few hours where I will lead an opera tour organized by Arte & Travel in and around Verdi’s home province of Parma. Among other treats, we will attend performances of “Don Carlo” at La Scala (in Milan); “Nabucco” in Bologna, and “I Masnadieri” (“The Bandits”) at the Teatro Reggio in Parma. This, my friends, is pretty much as good as it gets, and I am most aware of how fabulously lucky I am to be […]
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