Masterworks: A Musical Discovery (2nd Edition) - Softcover

Holoman, D. Kern

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130205435 ISBN 13: 9780130205438

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2000

Synopsis

New edition of an integrated multimedia program designed to teach the core concepts of music appreciation. In the text, musicologist-conductor Holoman (U. of California, Davis) draws on his own lecture style and focuses on listeners' experiences as they begin to integrate music and the arts into their lives. The website and off-line CD-ROM include interactive listening charts, tutorials, composer biographies, self-paced and graded quizzes and listening exercises, interactive timelines, and about 600 graphics, music clips, and fine-art images. The 4 CDs contain an extensive music repertoire featuring distinguished soloists and ensembles. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

From the Back Cover

A COMPLETE PROGRAM

This interconnecting program includes a narrative textbook, a NEW content-rich Masterworks Website (with offline dual-platform CD-ROM), and 4 Sony Music audio compact discs. Masterworks enhances the traditional approach to understanding a musical work by using the personal computer and the Internet to unite the historical story, the visual imagery, and the music.

MUSIC APPRECIATION FUNDAMENTALS

At the core of the program is the text, Masterworks: A Musical Discovery. Using a carefully crafted narrative that draws on the author's engaging lecture style, the text focuses on listeners' own experiences as they come to integrate music and the arts into their lives.The 4 CDs range from Gregorian chants recorded especially for the project by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices to Bethany Beardslee's epochal recording of Babbitt's Philomel, composed with the Princeton/Columbia RCA Mark IV synthesizer. Soloists range from Vladimir Horowitz and Itzhak Perlman to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

BUILDING ON SUCCESS

Now in its second edition, The Masterworks program has been enhanced by a number of important new features:

• Harnessing the dynamic power of the World Wide Web, the main source for the student's multimedia musical experience is now the Masterworks Companion Website. An off-line version of the Masterworks Website is contained on an included CD-ROM.
• The contents of the Masterworks Companion Website has been reorganized so that it mirrors the textbook's chapter organization, making this intuitive program even more "user-friendly." Additionally, marginal icons have now been placed throughout the textbook alerting students to related learning opportunities on the Companion Website.
• As the listening experience stands at the heart of this course, an additional audio compact disc has been added to the recordings program. Ranging from Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G Minor to Amy Beach's Violin Sonata in A Minor to Tan Dun's Symphony 1997 (Heaven-Earth-Mankind), the new selections enrich and enliven an already strong program.

From the Inside Flap

Preface

In the introduction that follows, you will find the central features of Masterworks described: how it investigates the possibilities of integrated multimedia for the study of art music at the introductory level, and how it proposes a coordinated training of the ear, eye, memory, and mind for participatory listening. The objective is for students to achieve control of the materials of good music—from its sociocultural contexts through its languages and notation—in short order, to invest them with both the skills and commitment that encourage active citizenship in an acculturated public. My best advice, here at the beginning, is "Read on."

The second edition of Masterworks has been corrected, revised, and updated to account for the changes in our world since the first edition was readied for publication in 1997. Chief of these has been the rapid advance of Internet technologies, including the pretty well universal use of web browsers and, now, useful approaches to streaming audio. Accordingly, we have unified the appearance and operation of the Masterworks CD-ROM and Website to be virtually identical; take your pick. The success of the first edition made it possible to add a fourth CD's worth of repertoire this time out. I took this as the opportunity to include not only standard repertoire that simply didn't fit before (Hildegard of Bingen's Kyrie, a movement of Mozart's G-Minor Symphony, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, music by Amy Beach and Charles Ives) but also some less familiar material that for one reason or another I just happen to like (a bit of the "Zapotec" mass, a psalm by Lili Boulanger, Tan Dun's Bianzhong bells).

The repertoire chosen for study is published on four Sony Music Special Products compact discs, which may be used either with conventional CD players or with multimedia computers. In addition, the program features a companion Website and off-line CD-ROM that work in tandem with the music CDs to help students learn the fundamentals of music. Chief among the electronic features are listening charts with clickable real-time cues, where users have essentially, instant access to the corresponding cue point in the recorded music. (Real-time cue points are also given beneath the clef sign in relevant musical examples in the text.) This new ease of finding musical events on one's own affords a significant improvement in the environment for learning musical strategies: the ability, for example, to compare material in the second group of an exposition and corresponding recapitulation in order to hear the difference of key area—or, for that matter, the chance to practice well for listening quizzes. The technology also lends itself readily to classroom use, where the instructor can lecture and control playback from the podium while simultaneously projecting any screen from the Web or CD-ROM.

A principal objective of the CD-ROM/Website tutorials is to achieve some degree of parity among the students, during the early weeks of the class, in their mastery of the rudiments of musical discourse. Thus they can share common preparation for the historical survey that begins in Chapter 3. Students enroll in introductory music courses with every level of preparation and experience, from none at all to years of lessons and live performance; growing numbers arrive with the feeling that art music somehow belongs to the ones who've already had music lessons. Masterworks contends that disparities in background can be addressed most efficiently in self-paced autotutorial instruction, rather than in class or countless hours of one-on-one staff time devoted to remedial measures. The autotutorial units thus summarize the rudiments of music: staff notation, major and minor scales, a little harmony, and the instruments of the orchestra. They can be completed in a few hours—a weekend, perhaps—at one's own convenience, and our field experience suggests that the retention level is on the whole quite high. Throughout the course, students can test themselves, by chapter, using the genial quiz bank found on the Website/CD-ROM. Questions are designed to reinforce key concepts and attitudes as well as factual content found in the textbook.

For the rest, the focus of Masterworks is on the narrative treatment of the music and the cultures from which it comes: on serious reading for the pleasure of discovery. The listening charts and a few other materials included in the text duplicate the content of the electronic media in order to accommodate those who lack easy access to the required equipment; illustrations and pages of musical score have been included in sufficient number to evoke the appropriate visual surrounding. But in general we have made a systematic attempt to break away from the traditional textbook "look," where the author's companionship with the reader too often gets sidetracked in a page-by-page layout of sidebars and graphics. The text part of Masterworks is meant instead for linear reading, left to right, beginning to end. An early admonition is to read the book under a tree, or in your favorite quiet place, and a fall chapter at a time.

Among the threads and motives that run through Masterworks is an attempt to identify the present generation of students as the focus of an age-old tradition of elders passing art and culture on to their posterity. Hence the choice of Josquin's Deploration on the death of his bon pere Johannes Ockeghem, the illustrations of teachers with their students (notably the famous photograph of Schoenberg and his pupils), the selections by such noteworthy composer/teachers as Milton Babbitt and Shulamit Ran. In keeping with the technological orientation of the work is the suggestion that a new style period for music begins in the 1950s with the stereo recording and eventually digital systems that so altered how we make and receive music and how we think about it today. We focus on song as a particular identifier of American culture, lying as it does at the root of jazz, Broadway musicals, and the pop idioms. And nowadays, to be sure, there must be emphasis on the student listener's centrality to the very survival of art music, for it is a given that the future rests with the young and the young at heart.

The repertoire selected for study is mostly familiar fare, with one complete multimovement work (Beethoven's Fifth Symphony) and, where possible, self-contained shorter works. The point is not so much to venerate the canon as to touch the necessary bases in a reasonably comprehensive survey. Here, too, there are motives and threads, for example, the revisiting of passacaglia treatment in the finale of Brahms's Haydn Variations, and of theme-and-variations approaches in both the Brahms excerpt and the movement from Webern's Symphony opus 21. Fitting the material to four CDs and six survey chapters is meant to accommodate the 10- to 15week academic term with relative comfort. But the text also provides entree, under the rubric Recommended Listening, for the instructor to tailor the course to specific institutional needs and to vary its content in successive offerings. Updates, corrections, enhancements, and ancillaries are to be found on the Website – prenhall/masterworks

We mean to keep Masterworks bright and shiny, to which end the author and publisher welcome the participation of the adopters, faculty and students alike, in contributing to its accuracy, look, and feel. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As for the previous edition, my thanks, admiration, and enduring love go first of all to my family—Elizabeth, Kate, and Michael—for the hundreds of ways they helped see the undertaking through.

My thanks, also, to my collaborators at Prentice Hall and the academic reviewers who offered such useful observations on the strengths and weaknesses of the first edition. These were: Katharine Boyes, Wake Forest University; Helen E. Campbell, Bishop State Community College; William Andrew Cottle, University of Delaware; David E. Feller, Weber State University; and Jerry H. Ulrich, Hofstra University.

Masterworks was developed, and continues to be reshaped, in successive offerings of the popular Music 10 course at the University of California, Davis. Always there is substantial participation of the students in the class, majors and graduate students in music, and students in computer science. I am especially grateful to Donald Meyer and Mark Brill, who were lead teaching assistants for the course when the project was piloted and now teach it themselves at their own institutions. Brill, who wrote the Instructors Manual, drafted the discussion of the "Zapotec" Mass in this edition.

I am grateful to Paul Hillier and The Theatre of Voices for fitting the two Gregorian chants into an already cramped studio recording session, and to Suzanne Elder-Wallace and InQuire for recording other medieval and Renaissance material for this edition.

At Prentice Hall, Senior Acquisitions Editor Chris Johnson coordinated corporate complexities, while Barbara DeVries managed production of the book. Media Editor Deborah O'Connell developed the Website/CD-ROM and Mike D'Angelo, Web/Media Production Manager, coordinated its production. At Sony Special Productions, Tom Laskey translated my ideals for the recordings into practical solutions. To all of them go lasting thanks.

Last of all, and perhaps most of all, both the publisher and I thank the many undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis who participated in the project with unfailing enthusiasm, eagle eyes and ears, and imaginative thought. Successive classes learned the material over three manuscript editions of the book and ancillaries, watched the unfinished charts and images emerge, and waited patiently as the computer elements were made workable. This is, and always has been, their project, and their book. We all had fun getting there.

D. Kern Holoman
Davis, California

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0130205435
• ISBN 13: 9780130205438
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 406