Music Course Continues

I'm still listening to The Teaching Company's "How to Understand and Listen to Great Music." I'm on CD #9 out of 48 (one lecture per CD), so there is progress. So far, I've listened to each lecture twice before moving on to the next. I wish I could have done this in college.

Current topic: How much the language for which vocal music was composed affects its composition. Italian is a language capable of very long vowel sounds, whereas German is much more explosive and abrupt. Therefore, vocal music composed for Italian has a much different sound about it (and it can take longer to perform!) than it would if German were the intended language.

I'd heard before of problems translating opera from another language into English. For example, Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Neibelungen was performed for a while in both German and English by the Seattle Opera. The performances were only a week or two apart, and did the singers ever hate the English version!

I'm sure that Professor Greenburg, in this course, will touch upon this. In his course on opera, I'm sure he will.

I received a printed catalog from The Teaching Company the other day, and it was only about their wonderful offerings in the field of music and other so-called "soft" subjects. I'm thinking my next course should be calculus if not particle physics, not just because I'm fascinated thereby, but so I'll get catalogs that mention the math and sciences, too!