How to Listen to and Understand Great Music

I found such course. Honestly I do not understand great music and I'm not ready to spend $700 for 12 DVDs

(48 lectures, 45 minutes/lecture)

Taught by Robert Greenberg
San Francisco Performances
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley


This course can permanently enrich your life: with Professor Greenberg as your teacher, you will hear and understand an entire language of unmatched beauty, genius, and power.

Why is Concert Music So Powerful?

How can concert music—once it is understood—so move our lives? Professor Greenberg explains in his introductory lecture: "Music—the most abstract and sublime of all the arts—is capable of transmitting an unbelievable amount of expressive, historical, and even philosophical information to us, provided that our antennas are up and pointed in the right direction. A little education goes a long way to vitalizing and rendering relevant a body of music that many feel is beyond their grasp.

"And why should an understanding of concert music be worthwhile anyway? I would suggest a few reasons:

• The skills one brings to listening to music—imagination; abstract, non-concrete thinking; intuition; and instinctive reaction and trusting those instincts—have gone uncultivated in our educational system and culture for too long.
  
• Music, as a universal, non-verbal language, allows us to tap into the social, cultural, and aesthetic traditions of different cultures and historical eras. We become more aware of our shared humanity and the wisdom and vision of others.
  
• Music allows us to transcend our own world and partake in utterly different realities.
  
• Last, but certainly not least, good music is fun to listen to, relatively inexpensive—we can do it by ourselves or with others—and there are any number of ways to expand our knowledge and appreciation of the art."
  

What You'll Learn: The Tools, The Times, The Composers, and Their Music

"Grammar:" Professor Greenberg gives you an outstanding grasp of musical forms, techniques, and terms—the "grammatical" elements that make you fluent in the "language" of music. These are not dull concepts. Professor Greenberg alerts us to the need for them:

"Music, like any pseudo-science, requires an adjectival palette by which we can isolate events that without proper terms we might not even be able to notice. It's an interesting question to what degree language allows us to perceive things that are not language-associated. I'm a strong believer that if you've got the right word to identify something, you can perceive it. I think my favorite pseudo-science when it comes to this kind of thing is wine-tasting, where one has to come up with an adjectival palette that is almost a cartoon unto itself. But silly as these phrases may be—'Oh, this has a hint of young tobacco, and old oak fragrant with raspberries'—silly as these terms are, they allow us to draw distinctions without which we may not be able to draw at all. So we will create a useful vocabulary."

Here the list of course Course Lecture Titles

1. Introduction
   
2. Sources—The Ancient World and the Early Church
   
3. The Middle Ages—Darkness, Change, and Diversity
   
4. Introduction to the Renaissance
   
5. The Renaissance Mass—Josquin des Prez, Palestrina, and the Counter-Reformation
   
6. Secular Music in the Late Renaissance and the Search for Expression—The Madrigal
   
7. Introduction to the Baroque
   
8. Style Features of Baroque Music and a Brief Tutorial on Pitch, Motive, Melody, and Texture
   
9. The Rise of German Nationalism in Music Fugue
   
10. Baroque Opera, Part 1
    
11. Baroque Opera, Part 2
    
12. Baroque Sacred Music, Part 1—The Oratorio
    
13. Baroque Sacred Music, Part 2—The Lutheran Church Cantata
    
14. Baroque Instrumental Forms, Part 1—Passacaglia
    
15. Baroque Instrumental Forms, Part 2—Ritornello Form and the Baroque Concerto
    
16. The Enlightenment and an Introduction to the Classical Era
    
17. The Viennese Classical Style, Homophony, and the Cadence
    
18. Classical-Era Form—Theme and Variations
    
19. Classical-Era Form—Minuet and Trio I-Baroque Antecedents
    
20. Classical-Era Form—Minuet and Trio II
    
21. Classical-Era Form—Rondo
    
22. Classical-Era Form—Sonata-Allegro Form I, Part 1
    
23. Classical-Era Form—Sonata-Allegro Form I, Part 2
    
24. Classical-Era Form—Sonata-Allegro Form II
    
25. Classical-Era Orchestral Genres—The Symphony—Music for Every Person
    
26. Classical-Era Orchestral Genres—The Solo Concerto
    
27. Classical-Era Opera—The Development of Opera Buffa
    
28. Classical-Era Opera—Mozart and the Operatic Ensemble
    
29. The French Revolution and an Introduction to Beethoven
    
30. Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Part 1
    
31. Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Part 2
    
32. Introduction to Romanticism
    
33. Formal Challenges and Solutions in Early Romantic Music—Miniatures—Lieder and Chopin
    
34. Formal Challenges and Solutions in Early Romantic Music—The Program Symphony—
35. Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Part 1
    
36. Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Part 2
    
37. Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera—Bel Canto Opera
    
38. Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera—Giuseppe Verdi
    
39. Nineteenth-Century German Opera—Nationalism and Experimentation
    
40. Nineteenth-Century German Opera—Richard Wagner
    
41. The Concert Overture, Part 1
    
42. The Concert Overture, Part 2
    
43. Romantic Nationalism—Post-1848 Musical Nationalism
    
44. Russian Nationalism
    
45. The Early Twentieth Century and the Modernist Movement—An Introduction
    
46. Early Twentieth-Century Modernism—The Search for a New Musical Language—Debussy
    
47. Early Twentieth-Century Modernism—The Search for a New Musical Language—Stravinsky
    
48. Early Twentieth-Century Modernism
    

Course was found here