PHIL1916W: What's So Great About Classical Music?

Why should anyone today care about classical music? How could music composed ages ago have anything to say to us now? Aren't classical music enthusiasts just a bunch of snobs living in the past? The answers to these questions might surprise you!Many reasons are given for the importance of classical music, but only one matters: that it is, at its best, great art. But why? This seminar will try to answer that question by focusing on the canonical masterpieces as the product of unsurpassed artistic imagination. They are a kind of cinema of the ear? a play of motion, light, and shadow in some ways more vivid than anything presented to the eye. Once you understand this you have a way of getting quickly to the essentials, in which great forces collide, quests are undertaken, new worlds are visited, alien creatures emerge from the depths of the unconscious? and much, much more. All of this will be illustrated by a selection of music from a number of periods, genres and styles extending from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. You don't need any prior background in classical music for this course? just bring an open mind.

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