Professor Greenberg begins the course with an introduction to one of the musical language's key syntactical elements-timbre, or the actual sound or tone color of an instrument or instruments- beginning with the string section of the orchestra.
His exploration of timbre continues with plucked string instruments and woodwinds-both single- and double-reeds- as well as a discussion of the concept of transposing instruments and dynamics.
You conclude our discussion of timbre with the brass and percussion families before moving on to the evolution of the orchestra from the early 17th to the 20th centuries.
A simple definition of music offered in Lecture 1 was "sound in time." Moving from our exploration of the "sound" aspect of music, we now begin an exploration of the role of "time" in music.
Meter refers to how individual beats are grouped in a given passage. This lecture considers two basic types, duple meter and triple meter, the "dance meter" of which the waltz is the most enduring and popular example.
Examine some of the ways a composer can manipulate the listener's sense of beat and meter, including syncopation, compound meter, additive meter, and asymmetrical meter.
After three lectures of discussion about the "time" aspect of music -rhythm- you will return to its sound aspect, introducing and defining terms such as noise, fundamental frequency, pitch, pitch collection, note, melody, harmony, interval, octave, and overtone and Pythagoras's role in "discovering" the overtone series.
Professor Greenberg continues his discussion of pitch and mode with a focus on the essential building block of the Western pitch systems -the octave- and its importance in tonal music. In this lecture you will also explore musical modes.
Resuming you focus on pitch, you will turn once more to Pythagoras, and his investigation into what is now known as the overtone series. This paves the way for an examination of intervals, the evolution of tuning systems, and an introduction to the major pitch collections.
This lecture explains the concept of a tonal center, or tonic, discusses how musical keys are constructed and how they relate to one another. It also introduces a fundamental graphic and conceptual aid in understanding keys and their relationships -the circle of fifths.
An interval is the relationship between two pitches, and can range from the most simple in terms of acoustical ratio, where the two pitches blend well, to the most acoustically complex, where the pitches blend poorly. This lecture explores that range, from the simplest -the consonant, stable octave- to the most complex -the dissonant and unstable tritone.
Begin with an examination of the single most important aspect of music: melody. Here you will look at the four basic types of thematic melody: word melody, vocal melody, vocally conceived instrumental melody, and instrumental melody; and continue with an examination of musical motives and motivic development, and the function of motives in creating melody.
This lecture reviews and builds on the analysis of thematic melody begun in the previous lecture. Instrumental melody is discussed, along with other types of melody, including accompanimental melody, countermelody, periodic melody, and continuous melody.
The idea of texture in music -the number of different melody lines in a given section of music and their relationship to one another- is introduced by discussing the four basic musical textures: monophony, polyphony, homophony, and heterophony.
Functional tonality is the tonal system that dominated Western music from the 16th to the 20th centuries. It is at its heart about tension and release. This lecture discusses the roles of various harmonies.
Professor Greenberg concludes with the concepts of harmonic progression, the movement from one chord to the next; cadence, the progressions that serve as musical punctuation marks; and the techniques of modulation, by which a composer can change keys during the course of a movement.