Music and Its Place in History

14-episode course

Human civilization developed slowly, and history shows us that civilizations can come and go, even our own.  From history we can learn the mistakes that we’ve made and are likely to make again.  We’re human.  We follow patterns.

History can help us understand various social and political cultures around the world and know about those that have come together to make our current preferences and prejudices.  Music, of course, is inseparable from these stories, and the variety of musical choices, styles, and influences that have come down to us is enormously rich.  When studying music history, we learn about experimentations with sound and technologies that resulted in leaps forward, and about the individuals and places of genius and distinction.   

When I was first learning about the history of music, I found it to be dauntingly deep and wide.  The more I learned about a topic, the more I was aware of my ignorance on some other important thing or perspective.  For students of music history and theory, the siloing of topics makes the synthesis of the information slow and irregular.  I believe that giving an overview of the goal first, one that demystifies the purpose and keeps the student engaged with the art, really helps students find their way.   Such an overview can be returned to now and then to remind students about where a deeper topic fits into the whole.

This 14-session video course is designed to serve this purpose.  It covers a bit of world history, literature, visual art, theory, classical music repertoire, and world music.  It starts from earliest time to the present, trying to draw discernible lines between cultures and stages of human progress.   Since each session is no more than 45 minutes and the series is self-contained—including musical selections—the result is a general picture that hopefully generates interest in hearing, knowing and learning more.

I made some decisions as I worked on this.  Perhaps most significantly, I avoided using video.  I’m never on screen, and there are no performance videos.  All visual components are stills.  While I was tempted to create a movie or a documentary, I wanted to keep the story about music, and when music was being played I wanted the attention to be on listening.  That is also why I didn’t concern myself with overly sophisticated design for the informational slides.

This is not a commercial product.  Feel free to use these for your own non-commercial purposes.  All items that are not original or in public domain are not claimed within my copyright.  Other people hold the copyright for many maps, photos, illustrations, and musical selections.  Should this series be desired for commercial purposes, all these copyright issues will need to be resolved.