Understanding the Fundamentals of Music

The Teaching Company Course No. 7261 Taught by Robert Greenberg San Francisco Performances Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley (16 lectures, 45 minutes/lecture)

In this course, Professor Greenberg offers a spirited introduction to this magnificent language—nimbly avoiding what for many of us has long been the principle 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."

Course Lecture Titles

1.	The Language of Music
2.	Timbre, Continued
3.	Timbre, Part 3
4.	Beat and Tempo
5.	Meter, Part 1
6.	Meter, Part 2
7.	Pitch and Mode, Part 1
8.	Pitch and Mode, Part 2
9.	Intervals and Tunings
10.	Tonality, Key Signature, and the Circle of Fifths
11.	Intervals Revisited and Expanded
12.	Melody
13.	Melody, Continued
14.	Texture and Harmony, Part 1
15.	Harmony, Part 2—Function, Tendency, and Dominance
16.	Harmony, Part 3—Progression, Cadence, and Modulation