How This Class Works

Reading, Watching, and Listening

One of the challenges of reading books about music is you can’t actually hear any music. But one of the challenges of listening to music on headphones or speakers is that you can’t actually see the musicians playing or learn anything about the background of the music. 

I hope to remedy those challanges with this class. There are many great books written about classical music, so I’ve taken a number of them and pulled out sections to create a single, illustrated story of music. Along with that, there are many live performances available online. I have found the best available and woven them together with the text.

This means that as you read about Mozart’s piano concertos, you can see one performed. When you read about the string quartet, you can watch a performance of two violins, a viola, and a cello. This is the way music was intended to be enjoyed: as a performance.

Following the Story

Classical music performances go back many hundreds of years. We will therefore follow the story of music starting in the middle ages and continuing up to the early 20th century. That’s over 400 years of music and includes most of the essential composers and works of classical music.

We will start with the Medieval Age and the Renaissance. We will then look at the Baroque period including Handel and Bach. From there, we will explore the Classical period with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Once we reach the 19th century, the story continues into the Romantic era with Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms, and more. Finally, we will enter the 20th century with Debussy, Ravel, Sibelius, and Gershwin (plus a few others).

These names may not mean much to you now. My hope is that by the time you are finished, you will consider them new friends.

Putting the Pieces Together: One Semester or One Year

The course comprises 16 lessons. Each lesson, has both required sections as well as many optional sections. This enables you to take the class for half a credit in one semester (16 weeks), or a full credit in one year (32 weeks).

The class is divided into major periods of music which generally follow these time periods:

• The Renaissance and Baroque Eras – 15th to Early 18th Century
• The Classical Era – Late 18th Century
• The Romantic Era – 19th Century
• The Modern Era – 20th Century

There are multiple lessons in each period that normally cover one composer. Each lesson includes the following steps:

1. Three to four reading/watching steps.
2. One or more complete performance steps.
3. A Listening step that includes playlists based on the lesson content.
4. Numerous optional reading/watching sections and performances of longer works. These optional steps are marked with a “{+}”
5. One quiz that covers the three reading/watching sections.

According to HSLDA, a half-credit should include approximately 80 hours of work (or 5 hours per week for 16 weeks). Here’s a weekly schedule for the half-credit course, following the basic structure above:

• Reading/Watching sections: 1.5 to 3 hours (they get progressively longer in later lessons)
• Quiz: 30 minutes
• Listening: 1-2 hours

If you want to make the class count for a full credit, just stretch each lesson over two weeks and choose which optional steps you would like to include the second week. Please note that there are easily over 10 hours of reading/watching/listening material for each lesson; you do not need to do all the optional steps, just enough to fulfill the credit requirements.

The course pieces are very flexible and allow you to tailor the amount and difficulty of work to your student.

Listening Library & Equipment

This class will also provide ways of listening to music providing links to albums and playlists on Spotify, however you can often find the same works on Amazon, Apple Music, or even YouTube – you’ll just need to search for the album. These lists are also recommendations for the best performances if you also want to purchase them digitally or on CD.

Finally, in the following steps I will also give advice on choosing listening equipment for various setups, whether you want to listen on headphones or build your own stereo system.