Item Record

Reviews for Understanding The Fundamentals Of Music

(2 votes -
Login
to add yours)

Yes and no... and not for kids
»
I have not studied music so I cannot judge the content for accuracy but I found it interesting. It is an introduction to the qualities of music, concert instruments, composers and musicians but sadly presented with some "humor" that was, too often for my taste, questionable. In the section about time and tempo he says (paraphrasing) "Yes, MF meant something different in my younger days", (explain that to the kids). To demonstrate why Italian is the appropriate language for music notation he screams in a very loud and harsh voice for an excessive time in German. He makes some very unkind comments about composers, deserved perhaps but not serving the progression of the subject and without knowing more, sounding very mean spirited. The comments seem to fit primarily to demonstrate his sharp and biting wit. He drags out a "sideline" about people who mispronounce musical terms into comments on a realtor who said real-a-tor and works in a political fling at "people" who say nu-clear instead of nu-cle-ar... (twice, though I suspect "axked" would not earn a comment). There is quite a lot of this kind of thing, and a fair amount of screaming, more than I expected in a course on music.
I found myself wondering how much of his fact was influenced by his concept of himself as an entertainer and less of a teacher. I suppose that explains why disc 3 and afterward were completely clean.

GoodReads Reviews of