Having thoughtfully considered the facts, you are in a position to share your personal reactions, bearing in mind that “like” and “dislike” are highly subjec- tive concepts and need not imply judgment. Even a professional music critic, armed with years of training and experience, often forms individual opinions not necessarily shared by other equally qualified experts. This is fine, so long as opinion (“It was great!”) and fact (“The piece had three movements”) remain distinct. And you will strengthen your paper by supporting your opinions with facts: “The symphony lasted almost an hour; I found this too long to sustain my interest.”
As the semester progresses, you will find it easier to describe your concert experiences, because your increasing knowledge of style, form, and musical genres will enhance your ability to hear music and to articulate what you have heard. Most important, the exercises—such as writing concert reports—that you dutifully perform for this class will open your ears and mind ever wider to receive and fully enjoy the wonderfully varied musics of the world.
Jean Ferris
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Preface
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USIC: THE ART OFLISTENINGis a practical, concise textbook for the
beginning student of music history and appreciation, written in lan- guage readily understandable by a reader with no previous music experience. Throughout the text, music is presented in its broad cultural and historical con- text, never as a phenomenon isolated from the experience surrounding it. Rela- tionships are drawn between music and the other arts, with which students may have more familiarity, and between the music characteristic of one period and music of the distant past and of modern times.
“Connections” placed at the end of selected chapters draw further rela- tionships between the musical experiences of distinct cultures. They are in- tended not to teach these music traditions, but rather to broaden students’ understanding of music, discourage the misconception that the familiar is nec- essarily “right,” and stress the increasingly significant impact upon Western music of various non-Western concepts. They are placed so as to be noninter- ruptive of the traditional course and may be assigned as supplemental reading, should limited time preclude covering them in class.
The new Student’s Preface, covering the material formerly included in Part One of the text, introduces techniques for understanding and enjoying live per- formances. The section here on “How to Write about Music” offers information that will be helpful to students in their earliest written assignments. Throughout the text, brief discussions of the lives of great composers provide not only human interest but also a sense of musicians’ position in society, their aesthetic ideals and practical intentions, and the influence of their personal experience on the works for which they are revered. As American music assumed significance in the Western cultural experience, during the nineteenth century, we introduce important American composers and works. While the focus of this text is on art or classical music, the American musical theater and jazz have informed classi- cal as well as popular music around the world; and indeed the classification of these genres as “classical” or “popular” becomes increasingly obscure.
Again we have enhanced the listening repertoire by adding several new examples, some restored from earlier editions at the request of several review- ers. There is much more generous coverage of the rich nineteenth-century repertoire, including the “mad” scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place” from Brahms’s German Requiem, Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie, and
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Charles Ives’s “General Putnam’s Camp” from Three Places in New England. Pe- rusal of the twentieth-century listening list will also reveal important new lis- tening examples. The examples from earlier editions not included in this text are available to hear, with listening guides, at the Online Learning Center, as are all of the Optional Listening Examples mentioned in the text and listed at the end of chapters.
Four CDs contain all of the music for which listening guides are printed in the text (please consult your local McGraw-Hill representative for policy, prices, and availability). All of the resources previously available on a CD- ROM, including a concert-goer’s guide, demonstrations explaining the funda- mentals of music, and video clips of students playing orchestral instruments, are presented in this edition at the Online Learning Center, available to all users of the text. The Online Learning Center also offers, besides the additional listen- ing examples mentioned above, chapter outlines, resource lists, and test ques- tions. Testing software for both Macintosh and Windows formats is available. I am grateful beyond words to the editors and staff at McGraw-Hill Higher Education, whose constant support and unflagging good nature made the updating process a pleasure to work on. I continue to marvel at the creativ- ity, efficiency, and expertise of Christopher Freitag, Sponsoring Editor, and Susan Trentacosti, Lead Project Manager. Special thanks as well to Marley Mag- aziner, assistant to Christopher Freitag, and to Sonia Brown, who diligently searched for (and found) the photos that enhance this edition. And to Tom Laskey of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, thank you again, and always, for your great work and great support.
My thanks as well to the following prepublication reviewers for their valuable contributions to the improvement and refinement of this text through seven editions: Christine E. Beard, University of Nebraska at Omaha; Cheryl Boots, Boston University; John E. Brawand, South Dakota State University; Don R. Campbell, Southern Wesleyan University; Constance Cook Glen, Indiana Univer- sity; Conwell Ray Harris, Jr., Northeast MS Community College; Marie Labonville, Illinois State University; Lee T. Lovallo, National University; Jennifer McQuade, University of Mississippi; Jocelyn Nelson, East Carolina University; Frederick Rip- ley, Murray State University; Michael H. Turpin, Kilgore College; and Catherine Verrilli, St. Cloud State University.
Jean Ferris
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O v e r t u r e
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WE IN THEWESTERN WORLDare blessed with music in great variety, including music to accompany drama, music for instruments and/or voice, music for dancing, music for worship, music for exercising, and music for “easy listening.” Radio, television, tapes, CDs, and live performers bring folk, popular, and art music to us from all over the world, each kind of music offering something to, and requiring something of, the listener. The demands placed on listeners and on those who perform, or interpret, music vary greatly from one kind of music to another.Popular music, primarily a source of entertainment and relaxation, may require little if any formal training on the part of performers or listeners. But while the best popular music of any age has quality and substance, and perhaps—as the reflection of a particular culture at a given time—important sociological significance as well, the very characteristics that render music “popular” may tend to make it short-lived. Thus many popular songs soon sound dated, and their appreciation by later generations depends as much on their nostalgic as on their aesthetic value.
Some kinds of music serve a purpose or elicit a specific response. For example, music may set the pace and synchronize movements when we exercise, dance, march, or perform any rhythmic task. The background music in a movie intensifies emotional reactions, covers awkward pauses in the film’s dialogue, and provides a sense of continuity between scenes. Some religions use music to enhance the spirit of worship. Listening to pleasant, undemanding music relieves tension or lessens boredom.
Art music, on the other hand, does not necessarily serve any
functional purpose but may simply express an abstract concept the composer had in mind and thought worth sharing. The famous writer and art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) defined art as “the expression of one soul talking to another,” and most composers of art music (also called classical, or concert, music) have tried to communicate to their listening audience something of their experience, their personality, their mind, or indeed their soul.
Listening to classical music is itself an art, as the title of this text implies, and good listening constitutes an active, creative experience. The prepared listener applies a fair measure of knowledge and experience as his or her part in the successful cycle of creation, performance, and appreciation of serious music. Art music challenges composer, interpreter or performer,
and listener alike. The rewards for all three lie in the lasting value of great music and in the intense pleasure it evokes. A Beethoven symphony, for example, can stir the same emotions and evoke the same thrills in listeners today as it did when it was introduced two hundred years ago.
As you practice the art of listening, you may expect to experience greater pleasure from every type of music—popular and classical, old and new, Western and non-Western, religious and secular—than ever before. The highly sensuous pleasure we experience while listening to great music is our emotional reward for an intellectual effort well made.
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Conceived from ancient times as an integral component of all the arts, music is often depicted in literary or visual terms. Robert Fludd’s seventeenth-century engraving Temple of Music, for example, constitutes an architectural portrayal of harmonic relationships.