Discovering Music

To Applaud Or Not To Applaud

October 6, 2011

That is the question.  You are at a concert.  It certainly seems like the piece is over, and it was amazing, so you enthusiastically applaud . . . alone.  Since recent posts have explored where to find concerts and performances which your family might enjoy, here are some tips on how to figure out when [...]

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Finding Great Seats

September 24, 2011

In a previous post, I shared the thinking behind our purchase of season tickets to a symphony orchestra.  Maybe you liked the idea but would rather not commit in advance for either scheduling or financial reasons.  You still have lots of great options!  While all performances are not likely to be neatly compiled in one [...]

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The Biggest Page Turn in Music

August 20, 2011

There it was right in front of me: an 1803 edition of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. Our hosts, the owners of a private collection of 18th-century music, were pulling out treasure after treasure, piling the volumes on every available corner of the table.  Every item was important, historic, gorgeous. But two things stopped my heart: [...]

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Suggestions for Using the Discovering Music Curriculum

August 8, 2011

How long is each DVD-lecture? Lectures range from c. 25 minutes to 1 hour. Is it necessary to watch all the lectures in order? Yes and no. Understanding any given lecture does not depend upon having viewed the previous lecture. However, a student’s overall sense of the progression of history and cultural change will be [...]

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It’s All Ancient History

July 23, 2011

For parents attempting to link the study of music to the study of history, the period of ancient history presents an obvious difficulty: few to no recordings of music from the period.  However, the list of music about ancient history is long.  In a short series of posts, I’ll look at music which takes its [...]

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German Romanticism: Meet the Texas Moon

July 14, 2011

If only Caspar David Friedrich could have seen our Texas moon last night.  It wasn’t quite full, but it was a bossy-bold moon, so bossy, in fact, that it would have inspired Friedrich to rethink his already revolutionary style of painting. Oh, those Friedrich paintings—the ultra-depictions of German Romanticism!  Those radically introspective landscapes, framed by the backs of [...]

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A New Year of Learning

July 6, 2011

I guess it’s the heat.  I’m feeling a bit draggy.  Are you? Our Texas drought has dashed any hope of a normal agricultural season.  The barn is hot.  The animals are hot.  It’s hard watching our livestock foraging for anything that resembles grass. Yet, I know a freshness will soon arise.  It does so every [...]

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Music and Tarantulas

May 27, 2011

“Music is connected to everything.”  That’s our motto at the Professor Carol office and it proved a good one yesterday. I came home to find a fist-sized tarantula in my kitchen, perched at a 60° angle in front of the refrigerator.   Okay, where’s the musical connection? Tarantula’s are named after a southern Italian town Taranto [...]

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Potholes of History Continued

April 23, 2011

My last post chronicled the bumps I weathered along the road to learning history – including a pretty noticeable bump in graduate school.  During a semester at Charles University in Prague, I took course on contemporary Czech political history.  In that class, I realized I’d forgotten a major piece of World War II history, despite [...]

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The Best Part of Conferences

April 7, 2011

It has to be the best part of the conferences: meeting the actual students who are using Discovering Music. Increasingly, families are coming up and introducing themselves like this: “Hi, we’re the XYZ’s, and these are our kids. . . .” Usually the kids are shy.  Sometimes they seem a bit shocked to see me in person, [...]

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