The Modern Scholar: Understanding the Fundamentals of Classical Music

By: Professor Richard Freedman

Narrated by: Richard Freedman

Music is a performative art. It stresses movement through time and engages our suggestive sense of its passing. Music has tendency, it normally invokes goals of various sorts, both near and far. Music has closure, a sensation not just of ending, but of expecting no more. Music also has accent. It is a dynamic process of stresses and nuance that often varies in dimension from one performance to the next.

This course is not designed as a chronological survey of musical history and its many stylistic periods or moments, nor an exploration of the lives and output of individual composers. Instead, these lectures focus on the development of listening skills. Through this course you will develop new levels of aural awareness that will allow you to better appreciate the richness, complexity, and excitement at the heart of all great concert music.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2003 Richard Freedman (P)2003 Recorded Books

Somewhat dull...

Note: I'm a classically trained musician.

While I was able to follow this with no problem, I had difficulty keeping myself engaged, even with the supplemental materials.
Part of the problem was in the Audible format: it was somewhat difficult to rewind and repeat recordings, which meant I lost patience and stopped bothering after a few sections. Thus, his point was lost, and when he later elaborated, I just didn't care.

I will try this another day, however, and see if I like it better then.

Quick overview of classical music

It may be me, but a bunch of it was a bit above my head. It is probably good listen for those with more than basic musical understanding.

Educational

Will have to rewind several times and listen to it over and over in order to get a good grasp of the author's extraordinary knowledge on the subject

Not engaging, wouldn't recommend to avid, well-versed musicians

I gave the audiobook an honest 3 chapters worth of time (about an hour and a half) and in that time I've heard less than 20 minutes of music. The majority of the experience is the author just talking into the void.
On top of that, he uses incorrect terminology to describe musical things. An instance of this I fondly remember is when he described the volume of a Harpsichord as "mono-chromatic". That means 1 color. The correct terminology would be mono-dynamic, which refers to unchanging volume.
I feel that this book might be a good fit for someone with no background in music theory who enjoys very dry, abstract lectures. But for anyone with years of experience in music — whether performing, teaching, or studying — this likely won’t stick. It feels like it’s aiming more for philosophical musings with pretentious takes than grounded musical education.

Awful

This book was a shattering disappointment to me. Like, I suspect, many of my generation, I grew up loving pop/rock music. However, I feel like I’ve heard anything worth listening to already. Ninety-nine new releases in every hundred sound stale and derivative. So, to keep my love of music alive, I keep trying to get into classical music.

Paul McCartney suggested once that Mozart had a profile similar to a Beatle in 18th Century Vienna. No, he didn’t. The equivalent of the typists at the Cavern Club were not going to see the Magic Flute in the evening. They listened to folk music, Austrian or Bohemian or Hungarian as they found it. Everyone gets pop music straight away; classical music is something that requires a bit of homework.

I hoped this would be a book to help in that process of learning how to appreciate classical music. It’s not. It’s rubbish, a hopeless, mixed-up mess. The book is about the fundamentals of classical music. The very first chapter is concerned with the difference in timbre and playing style between modern instruments and instruments that were contemporary with the composer. That distinction is fundamental to classical music in the same way that learning how to operate the radio is fundamental to learning how to drive a car.

Reader, I hated this book. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

exhausting mess

author is pretentious and uses words inefficiently. I wouldn't categorize this as a fundamental to classics