The piano has inspired many of the greatest compositional works in the Western concert repertoire: extraordinary pieces celebrated for their compositional mastery, emotional impact, and their creative use of the instrument. In addition to learning about these masterworks, watch as three dynamic concert pianists perform live in our studio. This course is one you’ll want to hear again and again.

As a solo concert instrument, the piano enjoys an unrivaled popularity in Western music. Capable of a vast sonic range, from ethereal softness to thundering grandeur, its appeal is global and seemingly eternal. For nearly 200 years, audiences have packed concert halls and opera houses to hear performers play this single, phenomenal instrument.

One of the primary reasons for the piano’s popularity is the fact that it has inspired many of the greatest compositional masterworks in the concert repertoire. The piano’s harmonic and melodic capabilities, tone colors, and orchestral resources have fascinated composers—the majority of them highly accomplished pianists themselves—since the mid-18th century. The result is a magnificent body of work, from the intricate and lyric creations of the High Baroque and Classical masters to the passionate visions of Romantic virtuosos to the revolutionary sonorities of pianistic “impressionism” and modernism.

Within the rich repertoire of the piano, a group of unique masterworks stand out as the greatest achievements of this tradition. These historic milestones in piano writing are celebrated for several key reasons:

• They have commanded the respect of the music world through their compositional mastery and their extraordinary power to move listeners and mirror human experience.
• They have used the resources of the piano in groundbreaking or unique ways.
• They have stood the test of time, continuing to enthrall and amaze each new generation of concertgoers.

To study these works and to understand their genius and enduring appeal is to know one of the greatest accomplishments of Western culture, works that provide pleasure even as they deepen your insight into the power and meaning of music.

In The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works, Great Courses favorite Professor Robert Greenberg of San Francisco Performances returns with an in-depth exploration of the solo piano works he considers to be among the most exceptional landmarks in the literature. The 23 works you’ll study represent the selections of an internationally respected composer and music historian, carefully chosen to highlight the most significant compositional and pianistic achievements in the solo piano repertoire.

Encounter a Magnificent Tradition in Art

These 24 engrossing lectures guide you through more than 200 years of music. Beginning with the towering figure of Bach, followed by Mozart and Beethoven, you encounter the piano music of such great 19th-century masters as Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, before moving forward to visionary modernists including Scriabin, Debussy, and Prokofiev. In Professor Greenberg’s trademark style, each lecture focuses on a single work in a fresh, accessible encounter with the musical substance of the piece, welcoming listeners new to concert music as well as experienced concert music lovers.

In addition to your study of the music, the lectures expose you to a rich panorama of music history. You dig deeply into the artistic and social environments that the compositions reflect, shedding light on what inspired these great works and how they were created. As a third key layer of the course, you delve into the extraordinary history of the piano itself, discovering the ways in which the evolution of the instrument directly affected the music that composers wrote for it.

As a compelling feature of the video version of this course, the three dynamic concert pianists who play most of the musical excerpts encountered during the course appear on camera. This is a unique chance to not only hear the music superbly played, but to watch the pianists at the keyboard and to observe the extraordinary “choreography” of hands and body that goes into a performance.

A Solo Repertoire Unparalleled in Western Music

Within the wide range of periods and styles you study, you’ll explore these timeless works:

• Beethoven—Diabelli Variations: Penetrate the musical structure of this crown jewel of the repertoire, as Beethoven magically transforms the theme through successive variations, leading to a transcendent conclusion that invokes the spirit of Bach.
• Chopin—Préludes, opus 28: From this iconic Romantic composer for the piano, experience the expressive power, intimacy, and nuance of these beloved short pieces, embodied in keyboard sonorities of ravishing beauty.
• Liszt—Years of Pilgrimage: Observe how these daring pieces, penned by history’s defining piano virtuoso, create dazzling pianistic effects that push the limits of both the player and the instrument.
• Debussy—Préludes, Book One: As one of the most original composers in piano history, Debussy forged trailblazing pathways in musical harmonies, textures, and nonlinear time, all of which you’ll follow in these powerfully evocative miniatures.
• Albéniz—Iberia: In this luminous journey into the culture of Spain, grasp the compositional techniques through which Albéniz evokes the reverie and passion of Andalusian gypsies, guitarists, and Flamenco dancers.
• Copland—Piano Variations: From our own shores, discover the brilliant synthesis of European modernism, West African rhythm and melodic structure, jazz, and machine-age dynamism that drives this uniquely American masterwork.

The Piano: History of a Cultural Treasure

Parallel with the unfolding of the musical repertoire, you follow the history of the piano’s technological evolution, from the development in 1700 of the first piano “action”—a mechanism enabling the instrument to produce gradations of volume from soft to loud—through successive design innovations that increased the instrument’s power and resonance, culminating with the fully modern piano of the 1870s. Here, you discover how changes in piano design made entire new types of keyboard music possible.

You learn, for example, about the “double escapement” mechanism, pioneered in the 1820s, that made fast repeated notes possible and allowed Liszt to create a sort of piano music that could never have been played on earlier pianos. And you grasp how Debussy used the resonance and overtones of the modern piano to create the shimmering, otherworldly atmospheres that characterize his piano writing.

In studying the individual works in the course, you learn about the musical forms and structural procedures that underlie them—such as sonata form, rondo form, fugue, and canon—allowing you to follow the music’s structure as you listen, and also to appreciate the masterful use of these forms. Understanding sonata form, for example, allows you to appreciate how Prokofiev’s thoroughly modernist use of the form differed from its use by Beethoven and Liszt before him, and how the three composers employed this same musical structure to realize hugely different expressive visions.

You also learn in detail about the compositional means used by the great composers for the piano to realize their creative impulses. Early in the course, you see how Bach used the musical pitches of his Fugue no. 4 to depict the Christian cross, making explicit his own identification with Christ’s suffering. Later, you study Schubert’s glorious use of lyric, thematic melodies. And you learn how Alexander Scriabin, fulfilling a vision of music as spiritual revelation, employed a “mystic chord” to create a sound outside of traditional tonality.

Larger than Life Creative Spirits

Throughout the lectures, you look penetratingly into the circumstances surrounding the composition of the individual works and the historical background of their writing. In this inquiry, Professor Greenberg provides fascinating glimpses into the process of musical creation and reveals insights into some of Western art’s most remarkable personalities:

• Chopin, whose obsessive creative process included shutting himself in for days, weeping, breaking his pens, and agonizing—sometimes for weeks—over a single page
• Liszt, who cut the figure of a 19th-century rock star, driving awestruck fans to ecstatic adulation during his pyrotechnical performances
• Brahms, who, declared by Schumann to be the new Beethoven, burned piles of his own works in fanatical self-criticism
• Scriabin, whose embrace of Gnosticism and quest to reveal divine knowledge through music pushed him to the edge of sanity
• Prokofiev, who, during the terror under Stalin, doggedly pursued his own musical vision in some works while adhering to the artistic dictates of the Soviet state in others

In The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works, you’ll delve deeply into a body of works that have enthralled, astounded, and profoundly moved generations of listeners. An educational journey you won’t find anywhere else, these twenty-four, 45-minute lectures give you the knowledge and insight to enjoy and appreciate the stunningly diverse literature of the piano.

Join a master composer and musicologist in discovering these great works of art, which make the solo piano tradition one of the superlative, enduring riches of our culture.

About the Author

Dr. Robert Greenberg is Music Historian-in-Residence with San Francisco Performances. A graduate of Princeton University, Professor Greenberg holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He has seen his compositions—which include more than 45 works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles—performed all over the world, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, England, Ireland, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands.

He has served on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley; California State University, Hayward; and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and has lectured for some of the most prestigious musical and arts organizations in the United States, including the San Francisco Symphony, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Van Cliburn Foundation, and the Chicago Symphony. For The Great Courses, he has recorded more than 500 lectures on a range of composers and classical music genres.

Professor Greenberg is a Steinway Artist. His many other honors include three Nicola de Lorenzo Composition Prizes and a Koussevitzky commission from the Library of Congress. He has been profiled in various major publications, including The Wall Street Journal; Inc. magazine; and the London Times.

Product details

• Full Audiobook MP3 Program
• Full PDF Guidebook Included
• Listening Length 19 hours and 28 minutes
• Author Robert Greenberg, The Great Courses
• Narrator Robert Greenberg
• Release Date September 27, 2013
• Publisher The Great Courses
• Version Unabridged
• Language English
• ASIN B00F534MFQ

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We all know that beneath the surface of music, beyond the joy or excitement or even heartache that this beautiful language of sound can stir within us, lies the often mysterious realm of music theory—a complex syntax of structural and instrumental resources that composers may draw on.

No matter what kind of music we listen to—symphony or string quartet, saxophone solo or vocal ballad, hip hop or Gregorian chant—we feel the impact of that music and have done so all our lives, even though we may not know how such impact is achieved, or understand the fundamental processes of musical composition.

But what if we did understand how certain musical effects were achieved? What if we could learn to follow the often-intimidating language of key signatures, pitch, mode, melody, meter, and other parts of musical structure used by composers? What if we could recognize these various components at work as we listened to our favorite music? What if we could “speak” the language of Western music?

It’s a language that Professor Robert Greenberg calls rich, varied, and magnificent, and he has little doubt about the rewards of even a beginning level of fluency.

“It’s a language that pays us back tenfold—a hundredfold—for every detail we come to recognize and perceive! And it’s a language that will only get richer and more varied, as our increasingly global culture contributes ever more vocabulary to it.”

Learn the Basics of Music Theory without Knowing How to Read Music!

In this course, Professor Greenberg offers a spirited introduction to this magnificent language—nimbly avoiding what for many of us has long been the principal roadblock, the need to read music.

For anyone wanting to master music’s language, being able to read musical notation is a necessity. But this course, as Professor Greenberg notes, is a basic course, designed to introduce you to music’s language in a way that is similar to the way you learned your own native language, by “discovering and exploring musical syntax through our ears—by learning what the parts of musical speech sound like—rather than what they look like on paper.”

By sidestepping the necessity to read music, these lectures represent an extremely rare opportunity in musical education—an opportunity to experience a solid introduction to music theory’s basics in a way that is not technically intimidating, yet provides a substantial grounding in the fundamentals. As such, Professor Greenberg has devised a highly individualized approach to music theory. There is simply little or no literature in this field that can teach as much without recourse to music notation. Thus, it can appeal to those who are not learning, or even planning to learn, to play a musical instrument or to compose. It can even be beneficial to musicians who do not play a keyboard instrument and may have had difficulty grasping some of the more abstract concepts of music. As much as anything else, the course is designed to help deepen and intensify the experience of Professor Greenberg’s other Teaching Company Courses, currently 21 in number.

Professor Greenberg has made use of a variety of tools, including thoughtfully chosen recorded examples, his own demonstrations at the piano, and helpful diagrams. One of those diagrams—a reproduction of a piano keyboard, with its keys identified—frees the student from needing access to a piano or any other keyboard instrument, a traditional demand of most music theory courses. It’s of tremendous help in visualizing many of the course’s most important concepts, such as how “pitch collections” are built, and it opens up the benefits of this course to anyone without access to a piano or keyboard instrument.

The extent of those benefits becomes clear the moment you start to apply the basic knowledge taught in this course. You’ll listen to music with new levels of understanding and appreciation, not only when you find yourself at the concert hall, but also at home with your stereo, and when you’re listening to your favorite music in the car or on a portable player.

Listen Over and Over and Learn More Each Time!

Each time you listen to this course—and Professor Greenberg has designed it to be listened to again and again—you increase your music-listening skills and come to appreciate what a complex and rewarding study music theory can be.

These are lectures that will prepare you, in Professor Greenberg’s words, to “hear and identify those aspects of the musical language that are, collectively, the means to comprehending, on an intimate level, the music of the Western repertoire and, to a significant degree, the music of many other world cultures as well.”

It’s difficult to imagine a teacher more qualified to help you reach that goal. Professor Greenberg is one of The Teaching Company’s most highly regarded, popular, and prolific teachers—as well as an award-winning composer in his own right. He has produced more than 500 lectures for The Teaching Company on a range of composers and genres, each marked by his characteristic knowledge, enthusiasm, humor, and, most important, unique ability to teach the technicalities of music to nontechnical audiences. A love of music and a desire to understand it are the only prerequisites you need.

All these skills are on constant display throughout the lectures, as Professor Greenberg takes you step by step through the material, laying a firm foundation before introducing the next concept. He begins by introducing you to the instrumental families of the orchestra and their characteristics, before moving on to subjects that might seem intimidating in a classroom: pulse and meter; sound, pitch, and pitch collections; melody and texture; tonality and tonal harmony. Professor Greenberg’s lectures are clear and purposeful.

Learn about the People behind the Music

Along the way, you’ll learn the human side of music—about the men and women who write and play it—and discover, for example, that:

• When violinists or other string players use the bow over the fingerboard, or neck, of their instruments, a lovely, flutelike sound is produced, similar to the effect of clamping a comb-shaped muting device to the instrument’s bridge. The technique is called sul tasto. Even though it is an effect that can be achieved instantly, without having to pause to clamp on a mute, string players generally dislike it. That’s because the rosin they use on the hair of their bows to make the hair grip the strings gets on a part of the strings that may come into contact with the players’ fingers—an unwelcome experience for string players. Not wishing to incur the wrath of the string section, experienced composers have thus learned to avoid using sul tasto unless absolutely necessary.
• The piccolo has so much power that its piercingly brilliant sound can be painful, so piccolo players wear earplugs when they practice to protect themselves from their own instruments.
• The extraordinary two-and-a-half octave upward slide—or glissando—that begins George Gershwin’s 1924 Rhapsody in Blue has become the most famous clarinet glissando in all of music. Gershwin did not write it that way; he indicated a simple ascending scale. But Gershwin’s original score was written for piano and then orchestrated by Ferde Grofé. Grofé knew that Russ Gorman, who would play clarinet in the Rhapsody‘s premiere, was extraordinarily gifted at playing glissandi. Grofé thus scored the opening of Rhapsody as a glissando, and the rest is musical history.
• Hector Berlioz was rare among major composers for barely being able to play any individual musical instrument. The “instrument” he could play was the orchestra. Considered the most original, adventurous, and innovative orchestrator that had yet come along, his “Treatise on Orchestration” has been a must-read for composers and conductors since its publication in 1843.

Understanding the Fundamentals of Music is as rich in musical lore as it is in technical knowledge. It will reward you many times over, not only as you listen and relisten to the lectures, gaining a new understanding each time, but also as you listen to different varieties of music and find yourself enjoying a much deeper understanding of their compositional structures.

About the Author

Dr. Robert Greenberg is Music Historian-in-Residence with San Francisco Performances. A graduate of Princeton University, Professor Greenberg holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He has seen his compositions—which include more than 45 works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles—performed all over the world, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, England, Ireland, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands.

He has served on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley; California State University, Hayward; and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and has lectured for some of the most prestigious musical and arts organizations in the United States, including the San Francisco Symphony, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Van Cliburn Foundation, and the Chicago Symphony. For The Great Courses, he has recorded more than 500 lectures on a range of composers and classical music genres.

Professor Greenberg is a Steinway Artist. His many other honors include three Nicola de Lorenzo Composition Prizes and a Koussevitzky commission from the Library of Congress. He has been profiled in various major publications, including The Wall Street Journal; Inc. magazine; and the London Times.

Product details

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